The Lobsterman's Daughter

[click to enlarge]

BUY NOW

Paperback $14.95

Ebook edition available -

apple nook Google Play Books

Media:
Request a review copy

Professors:
Exam copy availability

Related Subjects

Fiction

The Lobsterman's Daughter is a tale of murder and deceit in five generations of a Maine family, the Markhams. The story's narrator, Henrietta Markham, is a recent Harvard graduate, who submits an early version as her honors thesis and claims her work is an actual history of her family. She tells the story in her own voice and the conjured voices of her relatives, both living and dead. After graduation, in Barcelona she faces her own deceit in omitting her sins from the chronicle and adds a journal that documents her bizarre attempts at expiation and atonement. Markham sends the new version back to her advisor and asks that it be published as her final word on her family's history. In an epilogue Lieberman's author struggles unsuccessfully to regain control of a narrator who is at once incorrigible and essential. Ultimately the novel asks us to consider our capacity for evil, what it means to atone, and where forgiveness and grace reside.

About the Author

MICHAEL LIEBERMAN, a research physician and poet who living in Houston with his wife Susan, has published five collections of poems and won the 2001 Pen-Texas Award for fiction. His first novel, Never Surrender—Never Retreat, was published by Texas Review Press in 2012, and his latest collection of poetry, Bonfire of the Verities, was released by TRP in 2013.

Reviews

"Michael Lieberman, well known as a poet, first ventured into fiction several years ago with the publication of Never Surrender - Never Retreat, A Novel of Medical Politics in Texas. Now in a stunning departure, he has written The Lobsterman's Daughter, the chilling tale of a young woman, who claims to write the history of her own dysfunctional family and submits it as her honors thesis at Harvard. Henrietta Markham summons the voices of the dead to travel a vein of murderous psychopathology that runs through five generations. The story, told from almost a dozen points of view, is a dazzling, noir thirller, that is at once a who-done-it and literary fiction. In a surprising twist the book morphs into a chronicle of the narrator's life as she reveals her own dark secret and her attempts at redemption. This amazing book is an American Heart of Darkness-you should not miss it."
--Paul Ruffin, PhD
Director, Texas Review Press

Published by Texas Review Press

Book Sample

Book preview

Media:
Request a review copy

Professors:
Exam copy availability

Related Subjects

Fiction

Of Related Interest