Wild and Distant Seas, Tara Karr Roberts
Wild and Distant Seas, Tara Karr Roberts
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Wild and Distant Seas
A Novel

Author: Tara Karr Roberts

Narrator: Natasha Soudek

Unabridged: 10 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/13/2024


Synopsis

Evangeline Hussey has made a home for herself on Nantucket, though she knows she is still an outsider to the island’s small, close-knit community, one that by 1849 has started to feel the decline of a once-thriving whaling industry. Her husband, Hosea, and the life they built together, was once all she needed—but now Hosea is gone, lost at sea. Evangeline is only able to hold on to his inn, and her place on the island, by employing a curious gift to glimpse and re-form the recent memories of those who would cast her out.

One night, an idealistic sailor appears on her doorstep asking her to call him Ishmael. He seeks only a warm bed and a bowl of chowder, and yet suddenly, unsettlingly, her careful illusion begins to fracture. He soon sails away with Ahab to hunt an infamous white whale, and Evangeline is left to forge a new life from the pieces that remain.

Her choices ripple through generations, across continents, and into the depths of the sea, in a narrative that follows Evangeline and her descendants from mid-nineteenth century Nantucket to Boston, Brazil, Florence, and Idaho. Moving, beautifully written, and elegantly conceived, Wild and Distant Seas takes Moby-Dick as its starting point, but Tara Karr Roberts brings four remarkable women to life in a spellbinding epic all her own.

About Tara Karr Roberts

Tara Karr Roberts is a freelance writer, newspaper columnist, and journalism and English instructor at the University of Idaho. She is a lifelong Idahoan who grew up along the Pend Oreille River and now lives in Moscow, Idaho, with her family.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Vicki on January 06, 2025

I Tried, I Really Tried... WILD AND DISTANT SEAS: A Novel by Tara Karr Roberts No spoilers. 2 1/2 stars. I really tried to stick with this one, but it was so jarringly boring and repetitive that I decided to DNF it at 65%. At 65%, the story was on its 4th generation of women trying to find the elusive......more

Goodreads review by Christy on November 15, 2023

'I wanted to believe I had changed the story...Yet I came to see I had wrought something far more fragile, an illusion etched on a pane of glass'. Evangeline is gifted with the power to re-shape others' memories, 'I could suggest to someone that a recent moment was not quite as they remembered it'. W......more

Goodreads review by Kendra on October 11, 2023

Imagine: the Ishmael of Moby Dick has a liaison with an innkeeper in Nantucket, and she has a daughter. That daughter has one too, and so on. This novel follows the lives of all of those daughters, who all have psychic powers of one kind or another, and who are, for reasons I cannot fathom and which......more

Goodreads review by Isabel on April 12, 2024

Edit: It's been two months and I'm still thinking about the book. She's getting upgraded to a full 5⭐️. 4.5 stars rounded up. Beautifully written. Complicated women, generational trauma and healing, clearly a well-researched book - this was right up my alley, and yet, independently captivating. Ther......more

Goodreads review by Susan on March 20, 2024

Loved it! So unique and lyrically written. I was wonderfully beguiled from page 1.......more