Description: After the death of her wife, retired marine biologist Sarah faces a startling set of choices in her pursuit of love, friendship, and harmony with the natural world
Brief description: Lucy Jane Bledsoe's eighth novel, Tell the Rest, received starred reviews in both Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Times has said her work "triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances." Her fiction has won many awards, including a California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, and a Yaddo Fellowship. Two separate National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships have taken Bledsoe to Antarctica, where she spent months in the field with scientists studying penguins, cosmology, climate change, and krill. As a social justice activist, she focuses on voting rights. All Hands on Deck is her latest work.
Review Quotes: All Hands on Deck is a brilliant meditation on the ways we cope with loss and the patience required to find ourselves again. Set against a backdrop of environmental threats, Bledsoe offers a layered and emotionally insightful portrait of what it means to be a survivor when so much has been lost. Intimate, absorbing, and masterfully written, this is a story that explores 'the gulf between happiness and survival, ' and the quiet courage it takes to cross it.--Andrew Porter, author of The Imagined Life