Fortune's Rocks [Import] [Paperback]

Anita Shreve (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 518 pages
• Publisher: Abacus; 1St Edition edition (2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316789305
• ISBN-13: 978-0316789301
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 0.8 x 6.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (280 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,976,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anita Shreve grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts (just outside Boston), the eldest of three daughters. Early literary influences include having read Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton when she was a junior in high school (a short novel she still claims as one of her favorites) and everything Eugene O'Neill ever wrote while she was a senior (to which she attributes a somewhat dark streak in her own work). After graduating from Tufts University, she taught high school for a number of years in and around Boston. In the middle of her last year, she quit (something that, as a parent, she finds appalling now) to start writing. "I had this panicky sensation that it was now or never."

Joking that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejections from magazines for her short stories ("I really could have," she says), she published her early work in literary journals. One of these stories, "Past the Island, Drifting," won an O. Henry prize. Despite this accolade, she quickly learned that one couldn't make a living writing short fiction. Switching to journalism, Shreve traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, where she lived for three years, working as a journalist for an African magazine. One of her novels, The Last Time They Met, contains bits and pieces from her time in Africa.

Returning to the United States, Shreve was a writer and editor for a number of magazines in New York. Later, when she began her family, she turned to freelancing, publishing in the New York Times Magazine, New York magazine and dozens of others. In 1989, she published her first novel, Eden Close. Since then she has written 14 other novels, among them The Weight of Water, The Pilot's Wife, The Last Time They Met, A Wedding in December, Body Surfing, Testimony,and A Change in Altitude.

In 1998, Shreve received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction. In 1999, she received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey, and The Pilot's Wife became the 25th selection of Oprah's Book Club and an international bestseller. In April 2002, CBS aired the film version of The Pilot's Wife, starring Christine Lahti, and in fall 2002, The Weight of Water, starring Elizabeth Hurley and Sean Penn, was released in movie theaters.

Still in love with the novel form, Shreve writes only in that genre. "The best analogy I can give to describe writing for me is daydreaming," she says. "A certain amount of craft is brought to bear, but the experience feels very dreamlike."

Shreve is married to a man she met when she was 13. She has two children and three stepchildren, and in the last eight years has made tuition payments to seven colleges and universities.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars When Good People Do Bad Things, February 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Fortune's Rocks: A Novel (Hardcover)

As I began Anita Shreve's Fortune's Rocks, only to find that the novel's premise was the development and consequences of a turn of the century affair between a 41-year old man and a 15-year old girl, I thought "here we go again", a chick book filled with despicable male characters. After finishing The Pilot's Wife, Shreve's previous work, in which the pilot is found to have lived a secret life in another country, complete with second wife and family, my reaction was that the depth of such evil and deceit, while plausible in the plot of a novel, was a little fantastic for most to consider. And now in Fortune's Rocks, we face another quite improbable scenario.

But I kept reading, almost helpless to stop. Anita Shreve is a fine storyteller and as a native of the New Hampshire coast, I am a sucker for novels set there. I think she does a fine job of getting it right. It was also easy to picture the fictitious textile mill town and its immigrant population just miles from the coast that plays a major role in the story.

It was more than the landscape of Fortune's Rocks, however, that kept me hooked. A novel centered on an inappropriate and tragic affair is populated with very likable, even normal characters (save one, almost comically obsequious dweeb). And when these likable people step off the edge with disastrous consequences, readers, at least this one, ponder their own edges walked each day...maybe a secret friendship hidden from a spouse, or power exerted over an employee or family member that goes a little beyond appropriate, or a deceitful business relationship, or...? What is it that keeps most of us on the safe side of the edge? And how safe is that safe side?

In Fortune's Rocks, Anita Shreve moves freely into this reader's discomfort zone, yet this move seems somehow non-intrusive. There seems to be a way out. Her characters seem to do all the right things after the catastrophic event. And should any of us fall off that edge, it may be too much to expect that almost everything turn out so right at the end. For life is not a novel.

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a passionate story of love conquering all, February 9, 2000

By 

Jen "Jen" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fortune's Rocks: A Novel (Hardcover)

I absolutely loved Fortune's Rocks and I think it's one of Anita Shreve's best! However, every novel of hers that I've read thus far could be considered her best. I've read the Pilot's Wife, the Weight of Water, Strange Fits of Passion, and now Fortune's Rocks (in that order) and every story is so beautiful and every character so real that I find when I'm reading one of her novels, everything else is no longer a priority. I don't want to give anything away for anyone who is about to read this book so I'll just say that, as always, Anita Shreve has developed her characters so well that when I was finished with this book I was so sad that I could no longer be a part of their lives. I reccomend this book to any fans of Anita Shreve.

35 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars KEPT MY INTEREST THROUGHOUT, May 8, 2000

By 

Lawyer Gal (Northern New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fortune's Rocks: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book is my third Anita Shreve novel. The first two were the Pilot's Wife - which I wasn't that crazy about - and The Weight of Water - which I enjoyed very much. As a matter of fact, it was the Weight of Water which caused me to give Anita Shreve another try. And I am very glad that I did.

I found Fortune's Rocks to be touching and a real page-turner. Olympia and Haskell were not all that sympathetic, of course. They were selfish and self-centered, and did some truly terrible things. Yet there is something about all that passion that is very intoxicating!

This book reminded me very much of a book called Emmeline by Judith Rosner. In Emmeline, a girl goes to work in some type of factory (I forget what kind) and falls in love with an older married man. Emmeline ends up getting pregnant by this man, and he betrays her. I thoroughly recommend that book as well, by the way. It has one of the most shocking endings I have ever read.

I am now reading my fourth Anita Shreve novel - Eden Close - and am enjoying that one as well. I'm glad I discovered this very entertaining, talented writer and I'm glad I didn't give up on her after the mediocre Pilot's Wife.