Natives and Exotics [Paperback]

In the manner of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Natives and Exotics follows three characters, linked by blood and legacy, as they wander a world scarred by colonialism.

Transplanted halfway around the globe in 1970, nine-year-old Alice, the child of diplomats, is ravished by the beauty of Ecuador, a country her parents are helping to despoil. Forty years earlier, Alice's newlywed grandmother Violet confronts troubling traces of her country's past as she makes a home in the wilds of Australia. And before that, in early nineteenth-century Scotland, Violet's great-great-grandfather George flees the violence of the Clearances for the Portuguese Azores, unaware that he will have a hand in destroying the earthly paradise there.
The third novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Marriage of the Sea and The Love-Artist, Natives and Exotics is a hypnotic meditation on our passionate, uneasy affair with nature, in which we restlessly search for home.
US

PRAISE FORTHE LOVE-ARTIST

A small, twinkling jewel of a novel . . . Wonderfully seductive . . . [Alison] has found a voice, at once modern and archaic, lyrical and potent, that mesmerizes the reader. --Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times

PRAISE FORTHE MARRIAGE OF THE SEA

Beautifully balanced . . . so that the urge to find out what will happen next is counteracted by the wish to luxuriate in Alison's lush, beautifully evocative writing. --San Francisco Chronicle