Signals of Distress
A Novel
ISBN10: 0312424426
ISBN13: 9780312424428
Trade Paperback
288 Pages
$21.00
November 1836. A fierce gale beaches an American sail ship off the English coast, injuring an African slave below decks and eventually disgorging 300 head of cattle and rowdy American sailors into a hardscrabble fishing village. The same storm drives into port a steamer, bearing one Aymer Smith, the foolish, well-intentioned prig who will deprive the town of its livelihood, free the African slave, and set into motion a whole series of unforeseeable, tragicomic events.
One of the most seductive and surprising novelists at work today, Crace here creates a sharp and richly strange and believable world, uncannily familiar to our own.
Reviews
Praise for Signals of Distress
"Signals of Distress is an engrossing book . . . Crace is a genius at making round and really human characters, and his characters make [this] novel superb."—Newsday
"One of the brightest lights in contemporary British fiction. With beguiling narrative ease and prose lyric enough to invest the most ordinary events with mystery, [Crace] lays bare the commonplace events—always unrecorded—that crystallize later as 'history.'"—Charles Johnson, The New York Times Book Review
"Crace weaves a progressive magic into this mythic plot with masterful detail, luminous prose, and haunting characterization."—The Boston Globe
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
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Signals of Distress
1. THE 'BELLE' AND THE 'TAR'
Both men were en voyage and sleeping in their berths. Hard winds swept in and put their ships ashore.
The coastal steampacket, Ha'porth of Tar, on which Aymer...