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TERRA NOVA

Henriette Lazaridis

A haunting story of love, art, and betrayal, set against the heart-pounding backdrop of Antarctic exploration - from the bestselling author of The Clover House.
The year is 1910, and two Antarctic explorers, Watts and Heywoud, are racing to the South Pole. Back in London, Viola, a photojournalist, harbors love for them both. In TERRA NOVA, Henriette Lazaridis seamlessly ushers the reader back and forth between the austere, forbidding, yet intoxicating polar landscape of Antarctica to the bustle of early twentieth century London. Though anxious for both men, Viola has little time to pine. She is photographing hunger strikers in the suffrage movement, capturing the female nude in challenging and politically powerful ways. As she comes into her own as an artist, she's eager for recognition and to fulfill her ambitions. And then the men return, eager to share news of their triumph. But in her darkroom, Viola discovers a lie. Watts and Heywoud have doctored their photos of the Pole to fake their success. Viola must now decide whether to betray her husband and her lover or keep their secret and use their fame to help her pursue her artistic ambitions. Rich and moving, TERRA NOVA is a novel that to challenges us to consider how love and lies, adventure and art, can intersect. Henriette Lazaridis is the author of The Clover House, a Boston Globe bestseller. Her short work has appeared in ELLE, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, Pangyrus, and more, and she has earned a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. She is a graduate of Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston. She founded The Drum Literary Magazine and currently runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece.
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Published 2022-12-06 by Pegasus Books

Comments

The novel's strength lies in its impressive marriage of art and exploration. Lazaridis relishes in long, gorgeous descriptions of scenes and explanations of shot-framing and darkroom photo processing as intimate as a love letter. This underlying stream of artistic enchantment hits the mark and keeps the pages turning.

What would you risk to fulfill a desperate ambition? Whom would you betray if you had to - and at what cost to you, the ones you love, the world? Set against the dazzling frozen backdrop of 1910 Antarctica, this is a mesmerizer about love, rivalry, and the indominable strength of one of the best, most complex female characters I've read in years.

As if Jack London and Anita Shreve had a literary baby: an absolutely immersive story of Antarctic survival, suffrage, a love triangle, art, and betrayal. Engrossing from the first moment to the last page, when you'll immediately return to the beginning to start again.

At first, it's the forbidding ice sheets of Antarctica, a 'place that offers beauty with a fist,' that dominate Henriette Lazaridis's ingenious new novel. When the two strands of the narrative unite and then combust, the 'terra nova' of the novel's title turns out to be a 'new world' not of the land but of the mind.