Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i

(Paperback)

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Susanna Moore is best known for her critically acclaimed novelscomplex and compelling works like In the Cut and My Old Sweetheart. Now, Moores Light Years is a shimmering look at the early life of this cherished novelist. Taking the form of a Commonplace Book, it mixes reminiscences with passages from famous works of literature that were formative in her younger years. Born in Hawaii at a time when the islands were separated from the U.S. mainland by five days ship travel, Moore was raised in a secluded paradise of water, light, and color. As a child she spent endless days holed up with a bundle of books while the sound of the ocean and the calls of her brothers and sister drifted toward her through the palm grove. All around her, Moore saw flashes of the ocean described in those pages: a force of kaleidoscopic beauty and romantic possibility, but with an undercurrent of unfathomable darkness. In Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawaii, she weaves reminiscences of her childhood with some of her favorite pieces of literatureexcerpts from Robinson Crusoe, Moby-Dick, Treasure Island, Kon-Tiki, To the Lighthouse, and many others.

Reviews

"A most beautiful book dedicated to two great loves: memory and literature."
"Marvelous tales of a lost paradise, of love and of the sea."
"There is a gentle luminosity to Susanna Moore's recollections, like the reflection of the sun in the sea."
"Time and again Moore quotes from the classics of world and maritime literature with which she grew up. The beauty of her own book, however, remains unmistakable throughout."