Archangel: Fiction - Hardcover

Andrea Barrett is the author of The Air We Breathe, Servants of the Map (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), The Voyage of the Narwhal, Ship Fever (winner of the National Book Award), and other books. She teaches at Williams College and lives in northwestern Massachusetts.

“At last! It's finally here: the astonishing new collection from that genius-enchantress, Andrea Barrett. Who but Barrett can take on the inscrutable elegance of the cosmos and the messy complexity of the human heart in a single story? In her joy-to-read prose, with scientific precision and warm insight, Barrett translates the unknown into our world of reference. Her characters' thirst for discovery is contagious, and every story in Archangel is suffused with the most miraculous horizon light.”
- Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“The award-winning author returns with another collection of stories distinguished by uncommon scope and depth.... Barrett's stories rank with the best.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“Barrett’s consummate historical stories of family, ambition, science, and war are intellectually stimulating, lushly emotional, and altogether pleasurable.”
- Donna Seaman, Booklist, Starred Review

“Barrett, whose novel Ship Fever won the 1996 National Book Award, dwells on the intersections between science... and ethics.... Her training in biology and her meticulous research allow Barrett to speak of facts with authority, but in this powerful collection of five long stories, the facts come through the eyes of lost, lonely, elusive “investigators.” ...[T]here is indeed a sense of expansion as one travels onward in Barrett’s world, and pleasure in watching it fill out.”
- Publishers Weekly

“An elegant new story collection... Barrett frequently telescopes out of human frailty to an almost cosmic realm.”
- John Freeman, Boston Globe

“Does anyone write with a calmer authority than Andrea Barrett? ...Archangel... ranks right up there with her National Book Award-winning Ship Fever.”
- Lloyd Sachs, Chicago Tribune

“Pulls us relentlessly away from false comforts, into the dazzling, often chaotic, world as it really is.”
- April Bernard, New York Review of Books

“An evocative, sepia-toned beauty.... Lovely, lambent prose, balanced and graceful.”
- Michael Lindgren, Washington Post