Description
Product Description
From the acclaimed PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man comes a riveting high-seas adventure that combines Christensen's signature wit, irony, and humanity to create a striking and unforgettable vision of our times.
The 1950s vintage ocean liner Queen Isabella is making her final voyage before heading to the scrapyard. For the guests on board, among them Christine Thorne, a former journalist turned Maine farmer, it's a chance to experience the bygone mid-20th century era of decadent luxury cruising, complete with fine dining, classic highballs, string quartets, and sophisticated jazz. Smoking is allowed but not cell phones--or children, for that matter. The Isabella sets sail from Long Beach, CA into calm seas on a two-week retro cruise to Hawaii and back.
But this is the second decade of an uncertain new millennium, not the sunny, heedless fifties, and certain disquieting signs of strife and malfunction above and below decks intrude on the festivities. Down in the main galley, Mick Szabo, a battle-weary Hungarian executive sous-chef, watches escalating tensions among the crew. Meanwhile, Miriam Koslow, an elderly Israeli violinist with the Sabra Quartet, becomes increasingly aware of the age-related vulnerabilities of the ship herself and the cynical corners cut by the cruise ship company, Cabaret. When a time of crisis begins, Christine, Mick, and Miriam find themselves facing the unknown together in an unexpected and startling test of their characters.
Review
"Entertaining and elegantly written... Kate Christensen demonstrates there's life to be found in what may appear to be the creakiest of fictional premises... [She] is a sharp observer, not only of the layered social world of the Queen Isabella but of the shifting relationships between her characters...I kept thinking of Barbara Pym, another novelist who wrote astute novels about contained worlds. Like Pym — who has been described as the most under-rated writer of the 20th century — Christensen is easy to misjudge, but, as she demonstrates in The Last Cruise she's quite capable of navigating deep waters." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“A smart, fast-paced adventure story, two poignant love stories, and a shrewd and chilling warning to us all. What is not to love about The Last Cruise?”
—Lily King, author of Euphoria
"Christensen is a master at drawing us into the interior lives of her characters, toeing the line between satire and sympathy... comedy and humiliation... Having gathered these disparate people together, Christensen gently rolls and pitches the stage, dislodging stones of sadness that had been safely stuck in the crevices of their everyday lives. That discombobulation is the key to the story's appeal, its unstable mix of romantic comedy, class oppression and spiritual angst — as though Cynthia Ozick wrote an episode of "The Love Boat." Christensen also deconstructs the aura of the cruise ship... Mysterious and existential... She’s interested in the most intimate and profound changes we’re willing to make only when tossed by the tempest of life."
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Excellent... Above deck are wealthy vacationers dining on caviar and Lobster Thermidor. But below, conditions are hardly different from a Third World factory. Christensen gamely traverses both worlds in this waterborne upstairs-downstairs drama."
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“In The Last Cruise Kate Christensen has given us a smart literary thriller whose ambitions extend well beyond its genre. It’s terrifying in ways you don’t expect.”
—Richard Russo, author of Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls
"Excellent...The Last Cruise plays out a lot like a '50s disaster movie, and that's a good thing. It's a tremendously entertaining novel that never asks readers to turn their brains off — there's plenty of slow-burn suspense, but it doesn't come at the expense of unrealistic characters, which is a trade-off many authors are too willing to take... [Chr