Synopses & Reviews
This poetic novel, by the acclaimed author of John Dollar, describes America at the brink of the Atomic Age. In the years between the two world wars, the future held more promise than peril, but there was evidence of things unseen that would transfigure our unquestioned trust in a safe future.
Fos has returned to Tennessee from the trenches of France. Intrigued with electricity, bioluminescence, and especially x-rays, he believes in science and the future of technology. On a trip to the Outer Banks to study the Perseid meteor shower, he falls in love with Opal, whose father is a glassblower who can spin color out of light.
Fos brings his new wife back to Knoxville where he runs a photography studio with his former Army buddy Flash. A witty rogue and a staunch disbeliever in Prohibition, Flash brings tragedy to the couple when his appetite for pleasure runs up against both the law and the Ku Klux Klan. Fos and Opal are forced to move to Opal's mother's farm on the Clinch River, and soon they have a son,Lightfoot. But when the New Deal claims their farm for the TVA, Fos seeks work at the Oak Ridge Laboratory -- Site X in the government's race to build the bomb.
And it is there, when Opal falls ill with radiation poisoning, that Fos's great faith in science deserts him. Their lives have traveled with touching inevitability from their innocence and fascination with "things that glow" to the new world of manmade suns.
Hypnotic and powerful, Evidence of Things Unseen constructs a heartbreaking arc through twentieth-century American life and belief.
Review
"The author can make you weep in a single sentence...the events and relationships are rendered on the page with an immediacy that catches you up short." The Boston Globe
Review
"Wiggins fits her lyrical prose to a distinctly rural, Southern cadence, easily blending the vernacular with luminous imagery....Wiggins comes into her own with this novel, her best book to date." Publishers Weekly
Review
"There is roughness in Evidence of Things Unseen, an occasional grandiloquent reach beyond its fictional grasp. Rarely, you sense Wiggins spurring her story to lift it to the next stage..." Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Leave it to Wiggins to make this quirky story of passion and science so hypnotic. The plotting is digressive, the themes are stark, the language is lush, and the idiosyncratic characters are entirely winning." Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
Review
"With this poignant, realistic portrait of two people who love one another deeply but not equally, Wiggins may have tapped a vein of common humanity that will bring Evidence...a wider audience than her earlier work." Wendy Smith, The Los Angeles Times
Review
"When a very fine social novelist aims her literary harpoons at some rather tired archetypes, and powers her barbs with a heavy charge of modern mythology...she runs a significant risk of stabbing herself in the foot." Charles Platt, The Washington Post
Review
"At her best, Wiggins here belongs in the company of Eudora Welty....[T]he author brings these characters to life even as Ray (as in ray of light) and Opal (opalescence) begin to seem overtly apocryphal." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Strong characters, vivid settings, and extreme situations are described in masterly prose; this is another tour de force from a first-class literary novelist. Recommended..." Library Journal
Synopsis
From the award-winning author of John Dollar and Almost Heaven comes a stunning, lyrical novel about the unforeseen forces that shape people's lives.
About the Author
Marianne Wiggins is the author of seven books of fiction including Almost Heaven, John Dollar, and Separate Checks. She has won an NEA grant, the Whiting Writers' Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.