Description
Very Good dust jacket, a mylar dust jacket has been added, edge-wear, wear on spine ends, some age discoloration. The Very Good+ condition binding is tan cloth over boards, gilt anchor design on front, gilt lettering on the spine. Illustrated end papers. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 8.5″ tall x 5.8″ wide.
About the book (from the dust jacket)
Boon Island today is a humpbacked boulder-strewn ledge that would be hardly perceptible those who live along the seacoast of southern Maine if it weren’t for the tall lighthouse that rises from it. That tall tower by day and the bright beam shining from it at night are visible from Cape Porpoise to Portsmouth, a warning to coastwise shipping to keep off -to keep far off. But in the winter of 1710, when the ship Nottingham wallowed down the Maine coast in a howling northeaster, 135 days out of Greenwich, there was no lighthouse on Boon Island. There was nothing but the rock and the seaweed, and off shore, raising their heads in curiosity above the crests of the roaring breakers, a few seals. By the incarnate demon of ill fortune the Nottingham struck that rock, in the snow and the dark and the freezing cold, and the resulting story stands alone as an unrivaled drama of the sea and of man’s refusal to succumb to disaster, even when deprived of food, of fire, of tools. Of everything but a few scattered pieces of driftwood, sails and cordage.
No novelist knows the Maine coast, in winter and summer, as does Kenneth Roberts. Only a great writer could take the reader from the gaiety and charm of eighteenth-century England that fill the opening scenes to the crashing climax of the shipwreck and the succeeding climaxes of agony, hope, despair, bravery, horror and heartbreaking labor that follow. The writing is as Iean and solid as the ledges of Boon Island; as powerful as the breakers that pound endlessly against them.
About the author (from the dust jacket)
Kenneth Roberts holds a unique position in the field of letters. He voluntarily relinquished his position as Saturday Evening Post correspondent in 1930 to write his first novel, Arundel. Since then he has had success after success – Lydia Bailey, Northwest Passage, Oliver Wiswell, Rabble in Arms, to mention only a few. His novels have been published under 40 different foreign imprints, and most have become best sellers in England, France, Sweden, Italy and Germany.
For more years than he can remember Kenneth Roberts has wanted to tell the tremendous tale of the wreck of the Nottingham Galley Boon Island. Boon on Island and its lighthouse, about fourteen miles due south of Kennebunkport, have been a part of Mr. Roberts’ daily existence almost all his life. He deliberately avoided mentioning the Boon Island epic in his earlier Trending into Maine because even then he was hunting for a way to tell the story in fiction form. Now he has written it, and in the opinion of those who have read it, Boon Island may well be Kenneth Roberts’ greatest book.
