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Putnam
April 2008
On Sale: April 1, 2008
324 pages
ISBN: 0399154752
EAN: 9780399154751
Hardcover
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Fiction
If you loved The Jane Austen Book Club, youโll revel in Witโs End, a sly and clever novel of mystery, intrigue, and virtual reality. Witโs End is many things: a quest novelโa young womanโs search for the truth about her dead fatherโs past; a mysteryโthe story of a long-ago murder in which that father might have been complicit; and a gameโone that ensnares readers in cunning deceptions, challenging them to separate the true from the fictive. Set in contemporary Santa Cruz, the novel centers on Rima Lanisell, a young woman at loose ends, having just lost her father to cancer. (Rima seems to lose people and things habituallyโ sunglasses and car keys, lovers and family members.) Now she has come to coastal California at the behest of her godmother, Addison Early, who once knew Rimaโs father well. Perhaps too well. Rima is on a mission to discover just what that relationship was really about. Addison, a bestselling mystery writer, is secretive and feisty. Over the years, she has tried to protect her work and her privacy as her passionate fans have become ever more intrusive. In this age of the Internet, with its blogs, chat rooms, websites, its Wikipedia, false personas, and hidden identities, those fans have begun to take over the plot lines and the life of her famous fictional detective. For many, he is more real than Addison herself. So Witโs End is also a highly inventive take on the way dedicated readers appropriate their favorite books, perhaps the one act of theft applauded the world overโexcept by authors. Above all, Witโs End is Karen Joy Fowler at her most subversive and witty, creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is uniquely and memorably her own.
 Media BuzzDay To Day - August 13, 2008
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