Prospero’s Daughter

“The apocalypse wasn't quite what we expected.”

A novel in five voices, Prospero’s Daughter is told from the alternatiing viewpoints of musician Merrie Boone; doctor Peter Graham; architect Nicol MacNaughton; anthropologist Duncan Matheson; and the novel’s focus, Jesse McLeod, a marine biologist who long ago lost her faith, and in this new world of miracles, is fighting the necessity of regaining it.

Some time after the end of the world—an end neither nuclear holocaust nor ecological disaster but one clearly supernatural—five people converge on the ravaged coast of Michigan’s lower peninsula to make sense of what their lives have become in the wake of a change unparalleled since the Age of Faith gave way to the Age of Reason. In this new world reshaped by the cataclysm of a moon miraculously moved from its orbit and recast by the appearance of shapechangers and other wonders, some have lost their vocations, some their emotional anchors, some their loved ones. Jesse, a marine biologist with literay leanings, feels she has lost everything: her home, her friends, her lover, her purpose in life, her understanding of nature, her connection with the past, perhaps even her reason:

Powerful and invisible creatures or forces snatch me from a leap off the lighthouse. Through a telescope, I see angels dancing in the heavens and hear them singing. Every night, I hear the bells and music and singing of whatever lives in my woods, compelling me to come out with them like some enchanted heroine in a fairy tale, and yet I can’t see them.

Now Duncan—the man I thought I knew so well after fifteen years of a life together—becomes a hawk, a bear, something no longer human. What does that make me? Or any of us? How do we live in this world?

How would we—accustomed to a world based on logic and technology and the wonders of science—learn to live in a world where the dead return to life, the old grow young again, sickness and injury are things of the past, immortality is not only feasible but nearly certain, and the miraculous has become commonplace? What new truths would we have to learn, what old ones would we have to abandon? How would it change who we are, what we do, how we see ourselves and others?