Praise for Henderson's Spear "Richly imagined and crisply written... Romantic but unsentimental, this is a beautifully constructed story with fascinating characters and authentic details that play off one another in surprising and often shocking ways. The thematic homage to Melville is punctuated with other literary allusions that enrich and deepen an already thoroughly engrossing tale of the South Pacific." --
Publisher's Weekly ..".a fast-paced tale of travel, adventure, family (and royal) secrets, infused with a moral vision reminiscent of Joseph Conrad." -- Judy Stoffman,
Toronto Star September 30, 2001
"Wright has fashioned a truly global novel, fired by anger at the exploitation of the earth by colonialism and the economic forces that have succeeded it, and by a love for the creatures and civilizations that have vanished in the name of so-called progress." -- John Bemrose
Maclean's October 8, 2001
"Don't be put deterred by the fact that
Henderson's Spear is hailed as postfeminist and postmodern. It is also a page-turning adventure tale that grabs the Victorian notion of an Imperial boy's adventure story and turns it on its masculine axle." -- Sandra Martin,
The Globe and Mail, October 29, 2001.
"Ronald Wright has written a Gauguin canvas and a volcanic tremor of a novel." -- Len Gasparini,
Toronto Star "Charming and delightful.... Perhaps the greatest achievement of this novel is the way it reads as something intimate notwithstanding the grandeur of its scope." -- Mary Ambrose,
National Post "
Henderson's Spear is an intriguing, warm-toned, well-written and spirited novel, a credit to its tradition." -- John Spurling,
Times Literary Supplement "Powerful evocation of the Pacific world....[Victorian adventure] has succesfully been given a modern make-over by a number of recent novelists -- William Boyd in
Brazzaville Beach, for example -- and now by Wright." -- Adam Lively,
Sunday Times UK "A taut fiction of tremendous beauty." -- Susan Grimbly,
Ottawa Citizen "Sometimes a novel hooks you in its opening pages and doesn't let go.
Henderson's Spear is that kind of tale ... beautifully executed from start to finish." -- Douglas Johnston,
Winnipeg Free Press Praise for A Scientific Romance "
A Scientific Romance should...share with
Fugitive Pieces the very upper rung of [20th-century Canadian literature]." -- from Bill Richardson's foreword to
Great Canadian Books of the Century "An elegant novel...gripping and lyrical; you struggle to slow down but find yourself rushing forward." --
The New Yorker
"A treasure...delightfully witty and suspenseful." -- Alberto Manguel,
The Globe and Mail "Powerful...cunningly fashioned.... A profound meditation on the nature of time." --
The New York Times Book Review
"Deeply seductive and brilliantly sustained." --
The Observer "A classic." --
The Guardian
"A work of great beauty built on nightmare." --
Boston Book Review
Henderson is a Man of Empire. He has seen the world ebb and flow. When he dies, he leaves behind a treasure trove of objects, of momentoes to a life well-lived. To his grand-daughter, Liv, he has always been a shadowy figure whose stories exist on an almost mythical plane, until, clearing her mother's house, she discovers his diaries, which offer a glimpse into a world beneath the polished fagade of Victorian England. Some years later Liv finds herself writing to the daughter she hasn't seen since birth and tracing the patterns which have brought her to a Polynesian jail and which stretch back to the last century and to Henderson. In 1892, Henderson set sail on a journey accompanying Queen Victoria's young grandsons, the Princes George and Eddy, on a two year sojourn around the South Seas. During that voyage, the events he witnesses are to have a near fatal effect on his life.
A century later, Liv is left to piece together the fragments of his life and their meaning while at the same time attempting to clarify the more recent past: her own peculiar predicament and the disappearance of her father in the aftermath of the Korean War. The journey she undertakes is as harrowing as anything Henderson experiences but is informed by the weight of subsequent generations...