A Change in Altitude: A Novel

Overview

Twenty-eight-year-old Geraldine travels to Kenya with her new husband James with the intent of staying a year. In a dizzying multicultural city, she struggles to maintain her balance as well as her sense of self. Her marriage, and her understanding of the world, are shaken to the core.

Invited on a climbing expedition to Mt. Kenya, the newlyweds are caught up in a horrific accident. In its aftermath, Geraldine must try to understand exactly what happened on that mountain and what it has done to her and to her marriage.

A major author in terms of critical acclaim and bestseller status, Anita Shreve limns the secrets at the core of our closest relationships and the ways in which lives can turn on the axis of a single catastrophic event.

Editorial Reviews

Shreve (Testimony), who worked in Kenya as a journalist early in her career, returns to that country in her slow latest, the story of a photojournalist and her doctor husband, whose temporary relocation abroad goes sour. The year-long research trip is an opportunity for Patrick, but leaves Margaret floundering in colonialist culture shock, feeling like "an actor in a play someone British had written for a previous generation." When a climbing trip to Mt. Kenya goes fatally wrong, Margaret's role in the tragedy drives a quiet wedge between the couple. Compounding those stressors are multiple robberies and adulterous temptations, as well as Margaret's freelance work for a "controversial" newspaper. Written in a strangely emotionless third person, the novel is stuffed with travelogues and vignettes of privileged expatriate life, including the chestnut of Margaret feeling very guilty about being given a rug she admires. While some of these moments aren't bad, the scant dramatic tension and direct-to-video plot make this a slog. (Sept.)

Author Information

Bio of Anita Shreve

ANITA SHREVE began writing fiction while working as a high school teacher. Although one of her first published stories, "Past the Island, Drifting," was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975, Shreve felt she couldn't make a living as a fiction writer so she became a journalist. She traveled to Africa, and spent three years in Kenya, writing articles that appeared in magazines such as Quest, US, and Newsweek. Back in the United States, she turned to raising her children and writing freelance articles for magazines. Shreve later expanded two of these articles -- both published in the New York Times Magazine -- into the nonfiction books Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone. At the same time Shreve also began working on her first novel, Eden Close. With its publication in 1989, she gave up journalism for writing fiction full time, thrilled, as she says, with "the rush of freedom that I could make it up." Since Eden Close Anita Shreve has written eleven other novels: Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, Resistance, The Weight of Water, The Pilot's Wife, Fortune's Rocks, The Last Time They Met, Sea Glass, All He Ever Wanted, Light on Snow, A Wedding in December and, most recently, Body Surfing. In 1998 Shreve received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Little Brown & Company

Filesize

751.30 KB

Number of Pages

320

eBook ISBN

9780316071741