As John Rolfe Gardiner's gripping and elegant new novel opens, World War I is raging and letters home from Major William Lloyd describe his life as a volunteer doctor in charge of a base hospital in the "zone of advance." The Major's new command is both dream and horror to this upright son of an old New York family, bred to Victorian virtue and duty. Supplies are erratic, sanitation abysmal. Some of his nurses are behaving like trollops and an old prep school enemy turns up as his adjutant. On the home front, the doctor's anxious wife, Emma, has troubles of her own. Her daunting mother-in-law has moved the family to her Long Island estate to escape city germs. Her two sons, one of enlistment age, are developing alarming pacifist sympathies, and the flag-waving chauffeur is spreading rumors about them. Her teenage daughter is growing up too fast. But it's the doctor's correspondence from "somewhere in France" that most disturbs, with its frequent mention of the remarkable French nurse, Jeanne Prie. We hear about her devotion to the patients, her doctor-like authority, her revolutionary work with victims of the dangerous unknown fevers spreading through the trenches. We learn, too, of her mysterious origins, of claims that she was an assistant to Louis Pasteur, of the aura of suspicion and wonder that surrounds her. Gradually the doctor's obsession with Jeanne becomes clear to everyone but himself. And when his son is drafted and follows him to France, and when the nurse's audacious experiments involve her in controversy, the situation spins out of control, forever changing all their lives. Somewhere in France is a riveting tale of medical suspense, a portrait of a society in transition, and an affecting love story that explores the mysteries of trust and faith.

Somewhere in France

Literature & Fiction

Gardiner, John Rolfe

United States

KNOPF

High-school teacher Ray Sykes's passion for his daughter, Sonia, whom he follows from afar through her childhood, is complicated by her eventual presence in his class, her rebellious beauty, and her involvement in a teenage sex club

In The Heart Of The Whole World

Unknown soldiers

Dutton

A varied group of outsiders comes to settle in the old farming country of northern Virginia--a tough, fertile, resilient land that shapes and refashions its inhabitants--in a collection of stories

The Incubator Ballroom: A Novella and Four Stories

Going on like this

Atheneum

NEWPORT RISING --Historical Novel by prize-winning author John Rolfe Gardiner Pre-Revolutionary Newport, Rhode Island, thriving nest of the American slave trade, a virtual city-state of multiple faiths, independent traders and craftsmen, boasted a perfect harbor for its tariff-flouting commercial armada. It was thus a prime target for British invasion and occupation. Here, Cotton Palmer, journeyman printer and political essayist cuts a dangerous path between colonists who might shoot him and the British who hope to hang him. Palmer and the abolitionist lady-friend who won't be his wife are subjects of censure in the precariously-balanced town, where religious tolerance and the slave trade, freedom of conscience and bondage, side by side, sow the seeds of our American civil history. The novel delves into the pliable mind of this 18th Century hub where the war's outcome will turn many friends of England, and fence-sitters, into life-long patriots. John Rolfe Gardiner is the author of five previous novels and three story collections. He is recipient of a National Endowment grant, winner of the Lila Wallace award and has appeared in The New Yorker, American Scholar, American Short Fiction, Ontario Review, Oxford American, O Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize volume, and many other periodicals and anthologies.

Newport Rising

Strafford & Unison

By the award-winning author of Somewhere in France, a historical novel based on a true story of orphaned identical twins born to switched identities, uncanny communications, and terrible trials. Identical twins Rebecca and Linda Carey arrive at Drayton Orphanage in 1926, aged ten. Copper-skinned and blond, beautiful but diffident, their perfectly matched faces, manners, and voices make them indistinguishable. Drayton is an institution of stone cottages and archaic values (chiseled into one wall is the phrase A Woman Should Please, That Is Her Happiness) that to them is nothing more than a fantasy land with no bearing on their eventual future. They plan on getting as far away as a dollar will send a post card.The world that awaits them on their release, however, proves infinitely more complex--and dangerous--than any of their imaginings. Rebecca heads for China, only to discover her intended guardian has less than noble intentions, while Linda endures a tramp's journey across the United States to California, only to find herself captive to a fanatic's vision. Separated at opposite ends of the world, the twins' shared willfulness and navet has led them to similar straits. As Wor

Doublestitch

Arts & Photography

Music

Counterpoint

From the award-winning author of Somewhere in France and Double Stitch, a story collection so varied that it could only have sprung from the imagination of a master. The Magellan House cuts to the bone, its characters trying to maintain their decency and sanity while surrounded by duplicitous, confused, manipulative people. In Fugitive Color, an American painter's year in Provence teaching for at an idyllic art college is destroyed by the perverse intrigues of staff and students; In The Magellan House, a poor family takes over their landlord's seaside mansion after the revolution in Portugal-but their daughter maintains a secret love affair with a scion of the deposed family; In The Head of Farnham Hall a headmaster is forced to leave her post because a student wrongly accused of death-threats takes pathological advantage of the contrition owed her; In The Doll House, a rural French pri est is ruined by his own innocence, incapable of grasping the modern world around him in all its obscenity; In The Morse Operator, a brilliant decipherer of Morse Code can't navigate the military intelligence of the American Army during World War II; And in The Shape of the Past, a respectable widow

The Magellan House: Stories

Black Balloon Publishing LLC dba Counterpoint

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Books by Gardiner, John Rolfe