What if Anton Chekhov, undisputed master of the short story, actually wrote a novel—and the manuscript still existed? This tantalizing possibility drives The Summer Guest, a spellbinding narrative that draws together, across two centuries, the lives of three women through the discovery of a diary.
During the long, hot summer of 1888, an extraordinary friendship blossoms between Anton Chekhov and Zinaida Lintvaryova, a young doctor. Recently blinded by illness, Zinaida has retreated to her family’s estate in the lush countryside of Eastern Ukraine, where she is keeping a diary to record her memories of her earlier life. But when the Chekhov family arrives to spend the summer at a dacha on the estate, and she meets the middle son Anton Pavlovich, her quiet existence is transformed by the connection they share. What begins as a journal kept simply to pass the time becomes an intimate, introspective narrative of Zinaida’s singular relationship with this doctor and writer of growing fame.
More than a century later, in 2014, the unexpected discovery of this diary represents Katya Kendall’s last chance to save her struggling London publishing house. Zinaida’s description of a gifted young man still coming to terms with his talent offers profound insight into a literary legend, but it also raises a tantalizing question: Did Chekhov, known only as a short story writer and playwright, write a novel over the course of their friendship that has since disappeared? The answer could change history, and finding it proves an irresistible challenge for Ana Harding, the translator Katya hires. Increasingly drawn into Zinaida and Chekhov’s world, Ana is consumed by her desire to find the “lost” book. As she delves deeper into the moving account of two lives changed by a meeting on a warm May night, she discovers that the manuscript is not the only mystery contained within the diary’s pages.
Inspired by the real friendship between Chekhov and the Lintvaryov family, landowners in the Ukraine, The Summer Guest is a masterful and utterly compelling literary novel that breathes life into a vanished world, while exploring the transformative power of art and the complexity of love and friendship.

The Summer Guest: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Anderson, Alison

Dramas & Plays

Harper

The Summer Guest

Harper-perennial

"A love story, a war story, an ecological adventure, a biological poem, and a treatise on the fragility of life--Darwin's Wink has it all. The writing is so incantory that it almost floats off the page. In Fran, Alison Anderson has created a strong, flawed, and utterly believable heroine.... Like the elusive, bejeweled mourning bird it celebrates, this book will waken its readers to unexpected wonders. A beautiful book. I loved it." - Molly Giles, author of Iron Shoes The author of the critically acclaimed Amelia Earhart novel Hidden Latitudes offers a beautifully crafted story about two naturalists, both damaged by ghosts from the past, who find love as they work to save a rare bird species off the coast of Mauritius--and fend off a powerful townsman who is threatened by their presence.

Darwin's Wink: A Novel of Nature and Love

Literary

Thomas Dunne Books

Alison Anderson's Darwin's Wink is the story of an exquisite romance between two naturalists working to save a rare bird species on an island off the coast of Mauritius. Both are devastated by their pasts: Fran mourns the unexplained death of her Mauritian lover; Christian, a former Red Cross worker, has recently left war-torn Bosnia after the mysterious disappearance of his fiancée. As they slowly teach each other to trust again, the two must also contend with strange attacks on the island that place both their lives and livelihoods in grave danger.

Picador

When a near shipwreck strands a young couple on an uncharted island in the Pacific, they encounter a mysterious woman who may or may not be the legendary aviator Amelia Earhart but who has been stranded on the remote strip of land for more than forty years

Hidden Latitudes

Genre Fiction

Scribner

In the Land of White Death : An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic

In 1912, six months after Robert Falcon Scott and four of his men came to grief in Antarctica, a thirty-two-year-old Russian navigator named Valerian Albanov embarked on an expedition that would prove even more disastrous. In search of new Arctic hunting grounds, Albanov's ship, the Saint Anna, was frozen fast in the pack ice of the treacherous Kara Sea-a misfortune grievously compounded by an incompetent commander, the absence of crucial nautical charts, insufficient fuel, and inadequate provisions that left the crew weak and debilitated by scurvy. For nearly a year and a half, the twenty-five men and one woman aboard the Saint Anna endured terrible hardships and danger as the icebound ship drifted helplessly north. Convinced that the Saint Anna would never free herself from the ice, Albanov and thirteen crewmen left the ship in January 1914, hauling makeshift sledges and kayaks behind them across the frozen sea, hoping to reach the distant coast of Franz Josef Land. With only a shockingly inaccurate map to guide him, Albanov led his men on a 235-mile journey of continuous peril, enduring blizzards, disintegrating ice floes, attacks by polar bears and walrus, starvation, sickness, snowblindness, and mutiny. That any of the team survived is a wonder. That Albanov kept a diary of his ninety-day ordeal-a story that Jon Krakauer calls an "astounding, utterly compelling book," and David Roberts calls "as lean and taut as a good thriller"-is nearly miraculous. First published in Russia in 1917, Albanov's narrative is here translated into English for the first time. Haunting, suspenseful, and told with gripping detail, In the Land of White Death can now rightfully take its place among the classic writings of Nansen, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, and Shackleton.

History

Linda Dubosson

Americas

Modern Library

HIDDEN LATITUDES: A Novel

United States

When a near shipwreck strands a young couple on an uncharted island in the Pacific, they encounter a mysterious woman who may or may not be the legendary aviator Amelia Earhart but who has been stranded on the reomote strip of land for more than forty years

Hidden Latitudes: A Novel (Thorndike Press Large Print Paperback Series)

G.K.Hall & Co.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Media Culture & Environ. Co-P (Communications, Media, and Culture)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Routledge

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &amp; Francis, an informa company.

Media, Culture, and the Environment (Communications, Media, and Culture Series)

Rutgers University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Anderson, Alison. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Anderson, Alison

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Anderson, Alison. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Summer Guest: A Novel

The Summer Guest

Darwin's Wink: A Novel of Nature and Love

Darwin's Wink: A Novel of Nature and Love

Hidden Latitudes

In the Land of White Death : An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic

HIDDEN LATITUDES: A Novel

Hidden Latitudes: A Novel (Thorndike Press Large Print Paperback Series)

Media Culture & Environ. Co-P (Communications, Media, and Culture)

Media, Culture, and the Environment (Communications, Media, and Culture Series)