Natives And Exotics Pa - Softcover

PRAISE FOR NATIVES AND EXOTICS
"Jane Alison takes us where history books can't-or won't-go . . . Though set hundreds of years apart, these stories quickly flow into a single narrative powerful enough to show how closely related our familial, political and natural worlds really are."
-THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

"Vivid and poignant . . . What gives pleasure is how precisely [Alison] sees the fierce beauty of the natural world, as it moves, grows, evolves, both despite and because of the blind interference of humankind."
-THE SEATTLE TIMES

In the manner of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Natives and Exotics follows three characters, linked by blood and legacy, as they wander a world scarred by colonialism.

Transplanted halfway around the globe in 1970, nine-year-old Alice, the child of diplomats, is ravished by the beauty of Ecuador, a country her parents are helping to despoil. Forty years earlier, Alice's newlywed grandmother Violet confronts troubling traces of her country's past as she makes a home in the wilds of Australia. And before that, in early nineteenth-century Scotland, Violet's great-great-grandfather George flees the violence of the Clearances for the Portuguese Azores, unaware that he will have a hand in destroying the earthly paradise there.
The third novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Marriage of the Sea and The Love-Artist, Natives and Exotics is a hypnotic meditation on our passionate, uneasy affair with nature, in which we restlessly search for home.