Miss Fuller
When she died in a hurricane in 1851, Margaret Fuller was on her way home to America as the most famous woman in the world—a pioneering journalist, reformer, feminist, and member of the Concord Transcendentalists circle. But her private life was a complex mystery, which this historical novel unfolds. She ran a hospital during the siege of Rome, had a secret marriage and child with an Italian revolutionary fighter, and never stopped striving for fulfillment as writer, revolutionary, and woman.
“With beguiling intimacy and unparalleled eloquence, April Bernard recreates Margaret Fuller’s tumultuous last years…An absorbing and, finally, heartrending novel.”
—Margot Livesey
“A beautifully written and constructed gem of a novel that totally absorbed me into its world.”
—Caryl Phillips
“Fuller is our rebellious streak, the part of us who gets in trouble, who puts her hand on a hot stove and gets soundly burned. I can’t tell you how much I love this book.”
—Carolyn See, Washington Post Book World
Nominated for the Dublin International Fiction Prize
Pirate Jenny
Life sucks, but you can still get a good deal if you’re sharp. On this motto hangs the saga of a heroine who makes herself up as she goes along, never looking back. A closely observed and intricate comedy of class and gender, here is a novel of suspense and adventure on the stormy seas of New York in the 1980s—a book as smart, dangerous, and winning as the femme fatale at its heart.
“I loved Pirate Jenny—fast, furious, funny—and you’d better laugh in case you cry.”
–Fay Weldon
“Nothing and no one can stop April Bernard’s Jenny, and I wouldn’t want them to try.”
–Harry Mathews
Selected for B. Dalton’s “Discover Great New Writers”