Creation
Canadian novelist Govier became intrigued with the tantalizing ellipsis in the record of John James Audubon's heroic if maniacal quest to paint as many bird species as he could find in the wilderness of North America. The undocumented interlude is the summer of 1833, when Audubon traveled along the treacherously stony, fog-beset, mosquito-infested coast of Labrador. Taking her cues from Audubon's stunning and dramatic portraits of the resilient birds of this hard land, Govier offers a bewitching and thought-provoking imagining of what might have transpired in Audubon's risky life, postulating a scandalous love affair with a woman painter and an unlikely friendship with the orderly Captain Henry Bayfield, who is painstakingly charting the hazardous coast. Keenly sensitive to the implications of Audubon's illegitimate Haitian birth, and fascinated by the terrible paradoxes that haunted him--that he kills what he loves most, wild birds, in order to study and paint them, and that although he loves his wife, he seeks romance elsewhere--Govier artfully conjures a brilliantly insightful and ravishingly sensuous tale of adventure and longing and portrays a seer of epic spirit who knows that his beloved feathered creatures and their wild environs are as imperiled as they are spectacular.Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved