This masterful historical novel by Deborah Noyes, the lauded author of Angel & Apostle, The Ghosts of Kerfol, and Encyclopedia of the End (starred PW) is two stories:
The first centers upon the strange, true tale of the Fox Sisters, the enigmatic family of young women who, in upstate New York in 1848, proclaimed that they could converse with the dead. Doing so, they unwittingly (but artfully) gave birth to a religious movement that touched two continents: the American Spiritualists. Their followers included the famous and the rich, and their effect on American spirituality lasted a full generation. Still, there are echoes. The Fox Sisters’ is a story of ambition and playfulness, of illusion and fear, of indulgence, guilt and finally self-destruction.
The second story in Captivity is about loss and grief. It is the evocative tale of the bright promise that the Fox Sisters offer up to the skeptical Clara Gill, a reclusive woman of a certain age who long ago isolated herself with her paintings, following the scandalous loss of her beautiful young lover in London.
Lyrical and authentic—and more than a bit shadowy—Captivity is, finally, a tale about physical desire and the hope that even the thinnest faith can offer up to a darkening heart.
Industry Reviews
"Told in a haunting, multi-narrative voice style, Captivity is a phenomenal, literate read packed with mystery, suspense, compassion, intrigue and fear threading stories within stories of this brilliant novel -- indeed of those revolutionary times." -- Historical Novels Review "With her crystalline prose Deborah Noyes creates characters who feel lit from within and at the same time she teaches the reader to ask different questions, expect different answers. I love the many surprises of Captivity and the way the novel beautifully blurs the lines between the living and the dead, the true and the false." --Margot Livesey "Engaging...Circumstances bring the two women together early on in the book, notwithstanding their very different spheres of existence. Their intertwining stories, covering a fair number of years and miles, form the arc of the novel. The trajectories of their two lives create an effective double-strand, a sort of literary double-helix that uses as its raw material both faith-based spiritualism and scientific naturalism. Readers with a sympathy toward either philosophy will find much to ponder here."--PopMatters.com "In the end...it doesn't really matter what's fact and what's fiction. The novel is written in the third-person, but Noyes still describes what people are thinking and feeling enough for the reader to become invested in the characters. On top of that, she was able to pull me into the story and believe everything she's presenting as complete truth. It's rare that a novel can do that with as much ease as this one."--Feminist Review "Captivity is haunting and evocative, a heartbreakingly poignant, emotionally luminescent tale of the prisons we build for ourselves out of expectation and desire. Beautiful and subtly powerful. I loved it." -Megan Chance, author of Prima Donna and The Spiritualist "Interweaving two tales of passion and deception, Noyes vividly evokes an era of intense fascination with both the wonders of science and the world of spirits. An engrossing novel about an extraordinary time."--Barbara Weisberg, author of Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism
