Book Giveaway: Geraldine Brooks’s CALEB’S CROSSING

Thanks to the generous folks at Viking, I get to give away two galleys of Geraldine Brooks’s latest novel, Caleb’s Crossing. Brooks is the Pulitzer-winning author of March and People of the Book.

Here’s the description for Crossing:

Once again, Geraldine Brooks takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha’s Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, Brooks has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure.

The narrator of Caleb’s Crossing is Bethia Mayfield, growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless and curious, she yearns after an education that is closed to her by her sex. As often as she can, she slips away to explore the island’s glistening beaches and observe its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a tentative secret friendship that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia’s minister father tries to convert the Wampanoag, awakening the wrath of the tribe’s shaman, against whose magic he must test his own beliefs. One of his projects becomes the education of Caleb, and a year later, Caleb is in Cambridge, studying Latin and Greek among the colonial elite. There, Bethia finds herself reluctantly indentured as a housekeeper and can closely observe Caleb’s crossing of cultures.

Like Brooks’s beloved narrator Anna in Year of Wonders, Bethia proves an emotionally irresistible guide to the wilds of Martha’s Vineyard and the intimate spaces of the human heart. Evocative and utterly absorbing, Caleb’s Crossing further establishes Brooks’s place as one of our most acclaimed novelists.

For more info, visit Brooks’s website, where you can see a map created for the novel. And how gorgeous is that cover? It doesn’t come out until May 3 but two of you can win ARCs before then.

To enter:

• leave a comment telling me what you yearned to do as kid (for me, it was flying on a plane to somewhere exotic)
• have a U.S./Canada address

Giveaway ends next Wednesday, April 13, 5 p.m. PST. Two winners will be randomly selected via random.org then announced here, on Twitter and Facebook. Winners will have 48 hours to claim prizes before alternate name(s) are chosen.

Now let’s hear about your childhood yearnings!

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