A disabled Civil War veteran makes an epic, westward journey toward a fateful encounter with author Jack London, only hours before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
Rendered mute at the Battle of Gettysburg, Frederick Heigold returns to Dobbs Ferry, New York, where he marries a resolute suffragist and resumes his vocation as a clocksmith. Bereft after she dies in a freak accident, he accepts a commission to repair the enormous clock on the San Francisco Embarcadero, but the routine railway journey becomes a six-month odyssey. Finally reaching the Pacific, after having survived imprisonment, shipwreck on Edisto Island, and run-ins with assorted roughnecks and thieves, he happens upon novelist Jack London drinking in the Palace Hotel bar-just before one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history.
Eden's Clock, the twelfth and final stand-alone book in The American Novels series, calls into question the American belief in individualism to shape our destiny when confronted with irrepressible, chaotic forces.
About the Author :
Norman Lock is the author of The Old Man and the Heath: A Novel and Stories, the dozen volumes of The American Novels series, the short story collection Love Among the Particles, and additional novels, short fiction, poetry, and stage and radio plays. Among other honors, he has been longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and won The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and Big Other Book Award for Fiction. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
Review :
Praise for Eden’s Clock
Big Other Book Award Winner
Bridge Book Award Finalist
Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist
New York Times Book Review “What to Read Next” selection
Washington Post “Historical Fiction to Read” selection
“An enthralling American odyssey that is at once picaresque adventure, historical meditation, and tribute to the storytelling traditions of an earlier age. . . . Richly imagined and deeply humane, Eden’s Clock is a fitting culmination to Lock’s The American Novels series, a remarkable literary project.” —Big Other Book Award jury citation
“Rendered with an eloquence any journalist would envy.” —New York Times Book Review
“An epic journey that rivals Twain’s picaresque novels.” —New York Sun
“A thrilling, episodic novel of big ideas and national traumas.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Lock’s final title in his resplendent American Novels series . . . poignantly explores the nature of human connection. Rich in period detail and memorable characters, this is a fitting conclusion to the series.” —Booklist
“Entwining individual and collective fates, the immersive, propulsive historical novel Eden’s Clock sprawls across the early twentieth-century US.” —Foreword Reviews
“Lock’s skill in crafting an adventure novel . . . would be at home on shelves a century ago. By peppering his narrative with contemporary references and turns-of-phrase evocative of the early twentieth century, Lock succeeds in bringing the era to life.” —Historical Novels Review
Select Praise for Norman Lock’s The American Novels Series
“Norman Lock has created a memorable portrait gallery of American subjects, in a succession of audaciously imagined, wonderfully original, and beautifully written novels unlike anything in our literature.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“Shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” —Jane Ciabattari, NPR
“Our national history and literature are Norman Lock’s playground in his dazzling series, The American Novels. . . . [His] supple, elegantly plain-spoken prose captures the generosity of the American spirit in addition to its moral failures, and his passionate engagement with our literary heritage evinces pride in its unique character.” —Wendy Smith, Washington Post
“This is fiction of a high caliber. . . on the cutting edge of history, providing us with a way to grapple with our evolving sense of the past, as we wonder what is next.” —Carl Rollyson, New York Sun
On The Boy in His Winter
“[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finn’s journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into America’s past—and future.” —Reader’s Digest
On American Meteor
“[Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain’s spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter. . . . Like all Mr. Lock’s books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield.” —Wall Street Journal
On The Port-Wine Stain
“Lock’s novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter] but with decadent fin de siècle art and modernist literature that raised philosophical and moral questions about the metaphysical relations among art, science and human consciousness. The reader is just as spellbound by Lock’s story as [his novel’s narrator] is by Poe’s. . . . Echoes of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Freud’s theory of the uncanny abound in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction.” —New York Times Book Review
On A Fugitive in Walden Woods
“A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now. . . . This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day.” —Victor LaValle, author of Lone Women
On The Wreckage of Eden
“The lively passages of Emily [Dickinson]’s letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery. . . . Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock’s thought-provoking series continues to impress.” —Publishers Weekly
On Feast Day of the Cannibals
“Lock does not merely imitate 19th-century prose; he makes it his own, with verbal flourishes worthy of Melville.” —Gay & Lesbian Review
On American Follies
“Ragtime in a fever dream. . . . When you mix 19th-century racists, feminists, misogynists, freaks, and a flim-flam man, the spectacle that results might bear resemblance to the contemporary United States.” —Library Journal (starred review)
On Tooth of the Covenant
“Splendid. . . . Lock masters the interplay between nineteenth-century Hawthorne and his fictional surrogate, Isaac, as he travels through Puritan New England. The historical details are immersive and meticulous.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)
On Voices in the Dead House
“Gripping. . . . The legacy of John Brown looms over both Alcott and Whitman [in] a haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
On The Ice Harp
“Lock deftly takes us into the polyphonic swirl of Emerson’s mind at the end of his life, inviting us to meet the man anew even as the philosopher fights to stop forgetting himself. . . . [A] remarkably empathetic and deeply moral novel.” —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
On The Caricaturist
“Lock successfully mimics Crane’s impressionistic style in his marvelous depictions of late 19th-century America.” —Publishers Weekly
