John Dollar - (Wsp Contemporary Classics) by Marianne Wiggins (Paperback)

About the Book

Charlotte Lewes embarks for Rangoon in 1918 to escape the ruins of her life. After meeting John Dollar, a sailor with whom she shares a passionate love, Dollar, Lewes, and eight of her female pupils are caught in a tidal wave that sweeps them onto an island and into an atmosphere of menace and doom.

Book Synopsis

From Marianne Wiggins, the award-winning author of Evidence of Things Unseen and Properties of Thirst delivers "a superb novel, hypnotic, disturbing, and artful...so good that most readers will devour it in one gulp" (The Washington Post Book World).

Charlotte Lewes, a young Briton newly widowed by the Great War, departs for colonial Burma in 1917 to escape the ruins of her life. As a schoolteacher in Rangoon she is rejuvenated by the sensuous Oriental climate, and she meets John Dollar, a sailor who becomes her passionate love and whose ill-fated destiny inextricably binds her to him.

On a festive seafaring expedition, the tightly knit British community confronts disaster in the shape of an earthquake and ensuing tidal wave. Swept overboard, Charlotte, John Dollar, and eight young girls who are Charlotte's pupils awake on a remote island beach. As they struggle to stay alive, their dependence on John overwhelms him, and an atmosphere of menace and doom builds, culminating in shocking and riveting scenes of both death and survival.

Review Quotes

Booklist Wiggins is one of those critically acclaimed authors whose books acquire passionate followings...who find passion to be a source of both salvation and gothic nightmare.

London Sunday Times Marianne Wiggins does not so much tell a story as make her reader live it.... She renews our sense of what prose fiction can be.

Los Angeles Times Book Review Marianne Wiggins' power is disjunctive, disruptive; she pounds the atoms of discourse until they split and go radioactive....Wiggins writes with a feverish brilliance...close to prophetic brilliance.

New York Newsday At her best the incantatory Marianne Wiggins goes beyond magical to sheer demonic possession.

San Francisco Chronicle Richly imaginative...pure adventure.

The New York Times Book Review In making us see her characters' humanity, she also compels us to acknowledge our shared yearning and sense of loss.

The New York Times A powerful story that not only pulls you through to its final pages but also propels you back to the beginning again, where you find you want to follow her descent into hell a second time.

The Washington Post Book World A superb novel, hypnotic, disturbing, and artful...so good that most readers will devour it in one gulp.

The Washington Post Book World Marianne Wiggins dares to make fictions that stand in the face of heart-cracking circumstance, fictions that, in fact, resound with hearts shattering.

About the Author

Marianne Wiggins is the author of eight novels including John Dollar and Evidence of Things Unseen, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. She has won a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Heidinger Kafka Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She lives in Venice, California.