Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fever

Fever

Keane, Mary Beth

Paperback

General FictionHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $18.00

ISBN10: 1451693427
ISBN13: 9781451693423
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: Mar 18 2014
Pages: 352
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.20 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
From Mary Beth Keane, the bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes, comes a historical novel set in early-20th-century New York City about the woman known as Typhoid Mary, who becomes, in Keane's assured hands...a sympathetic, complex, and even inspiring character (O, The Oprah Magazine).

On the eve of the 20th century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. Canny and enterprising, she worked her way to the kitchen and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef. Sought after by New York aristocracy, and with an independence rare for a woman of the time, she seemed to have achieved the life she'd aimed for when she arrived in Castle Garden. Amid a growing public health panic, a determined medical engineer noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked and identified her as an asymptomatic carrier of Typhoid Fever. With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman.

The Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother Island, where she was quarantined in isolation from 1907 to 1910, then released under the condition that she never work as a cook again. Yet for Mary--proud of her former status and passionate about cooking--the alternatives were abhorrent. She defied the edict.

Bringing Gilded Age New York City alive--the neighborhoods, the bars, the park carved out of upper Manhattan, the boat traffic, the mansions and sweatshops and emerging skyscrapers--Fever is an ambitious retelling of a forgotten life. In the imagination of Mary Beth Keane, Mary Mallon becomes a fiercely compelling, dramatic, vexing, sympathetic, uncompromising, and unforgettable heroine.

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