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About Fever: A Novel
Product Description From the bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes, a novel 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). Mary Beth Keane has written a spectacularly bold and intriguing novel about the woman known as “Typhoid Mary,” the first person in America identified as a healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever. On the eve of the twentieth 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. Then one 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 kept 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 early-twentieth-century New York 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. Review “[A] gripping historical novel…Mary Beth Keane gives Mary her own voice, creating a richly sympathetic and provocative portrait of the very real person behind the pariah.” -- Caroline Leavitt ― The San Francisco Chronicle “In Mary Beth Keane’s wholly absorbing, deeply moving new novel, Mallon emerges as a woman of fierce intelligence and wrongheaded conviction…Transforming a lived past into riveting fiction, Keane gives us a novel that thrums with life, and a heroine whose regrets, though entirely specific, feel utterly familiar.” -- Kate Tuttle ― The Boston Globe “In Keane’s assured hands, [Mary Mallon] becomes a sympathetic, complex and even inspiring character…Not only is Fever a compelling read for anyone who gets drawn into medical mystery shows, it will also send shivers through anyone who’s ever felt the ill effects of gossip or hypocrisy.” ― O, the Oprah magazine “Keane continues to impress with Fever, her historical novel about Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary…Keane resurrects New York City in all its teeming, sometimes seamy splendor.” -- Susan Grimm ― Cleveland Plain-Dealer “Keane builds a sympathetic character…the result is that, while we occasionally forget that Mary’s disease is inherently linked with her fate, we never lose sight of her as an afflicted individual.” -- G. Clay Whittaker ― The Daily Beast “[Keane] is a talented storyteller, her style plain and steady, not unlike Mary’s demeanor. What’s most remarkable about this novel is its brilliantly visceral vision of everyday life in early-1900s New York City, a rich and detailed working-class backdrop filled with the sights, sounds and smells of tenement squalor, overcrowded apartments, unsanitary conditions, sweatshops, and streets teaming with people trying to survive…If you have an appetite for historical fiction, this novel could be infectious.” -- Don Oldenburg ― USA Today “Mary Beth Keane inhabits Typhoid Mary in the infectiously readable Fever.” -- Elissa Schappell ― Vanity Fair “[A] tender, detailed portrayal of willed ignorance collapsing in the f
