From Booklist
*Starred Review* Near the end of the twenty-first century, an old woman in Cornwall rescues a nude young man from the ocean, somehow dragging him from the beach to her well-appointed house. She is a world-famous violinist, who, despite having taken full advantage of life-prolonging therapeutics, knows death is near. He is obviously educated but lacks all personal knowledge. She calls him Adam. It suits her needs to reminisce and his to listen. Her remembrances are punctuated by daily life with Adam until she has told him all. Her colorful, eventful life almost distracts us from the exceptional tumult amid which it is lived. Her brother, more musically gifted than she, dies young. Her mother becomes, after her son’s and husband’s sudden deaths, a world-famous, tireless humanitarian. Her glamorous husband’s conducting career never recovers after a trumpeted world premier is upstaged by natural disaster. Yet brother, mother, and husband all are victims of macroevents that we in 2008 look on as dreaded possibilities but that she treats as only so much context. Another book, equally fascinating, could be written just to fully describe and explain MacLeod’s envisioned twenty-first century. This book forefronts a personal story within that vision and artfully suggests that, in human terms, the personal trumps the historical every time. --Ray Olson
