基本信息出版社：HarperCollins
页码：496 页
出版日期：2005年05月
ISBN：0061032050
条形码：9780061032059
装帧：简装
外文书名：岛屿
内容简介 在线阅读本书
Anny Butler is a caretaker, a nurturer, first for her own brothers and sisters, and then as a director of an agency devoted to the welfare of children. What she has never had is a real family. That changes when she meets and marries Lewis Aiken, an exuberant surgeon fifteen years older than Anny. When they marry, she finds her family—not a traditional one, but a group of Charleston childhood friends who are inseparable, who are one another's surrogate family. They are called the Scrubs, and they all, in some way, have the common cord of family.
Instantly upon meeting them at the old beach house on Sullivan's Island, which they co-own, Anny knows that she has found home and family. They vow that, when the time comes, they will find a place where they can live together by the sea.
Bad things begin to happen—a hurricane, a fire, deaths—but still the remaining Scrubs cling together. They are watched over and bolstered by Camilla Curry, the heart and core of their group, always the healer. Anny herself allows Camilla to enfold and to care for her. It is the first time she has felt this kind of love and support.
作者简介
Anne Rivers Siddons bestselling novels include Sweetwater Creek, Nora, Nora, Low Country, Up Island, Fault Lines, Downtown, Hill Towns, Colony, Outer Banks, King's Oak, Peachtree Road, Homeplace, Fox's Earth, The House Next Door, and Heartbreak Hotel. She is also the author of a work of nonfiction, John Chancellor Makes Me Cry. She and her husband Heyward split their time between their home in Charleston, SC and Brooklin, ME.
媒体推荐 书评
From Publishers Weekly
Middle-aged readers especially will warm to Siddons's 15th novel, in which a group of old friends play together, age together and endure the vicissitudes of fate. Returning to the Carolina low country where she is most at home, Siddons explores the mystique of an elite social strata whose members are held together by bloodlines, loyalty and tradition, and by the love of their city, Charleston, and the offshore islands-Edisto and Sullivan's-where they spend their leisure time. Newcomer Anny Butler, the director of a Charleston philanthropic social services agency, is accepted into the close-knit group, who call themselves the Scrubs, when she marries surgeon Lewis Aiken. Thereafter, the novel records the idyllic lives of beautiful people who have wealth, intelligence, breeding and a passion for hunting dogs. Siddons dwells lovingly on details of landscape and atmosphere, flora and fauna, home decoration, and food specialties and the bistros where they are served. Everything is picturesque to the nth degree, somewhat like a Thomas Kincaid painting. Relentlessly chirpy dialogue moves the plot along, while various illnesses and accidents take their toll on once happy couples. Lush overwriting sets the tone: one character "shone like a beacon in the great gilded room, and people flocked around her as if to a fire"; later, she is perceived as "thrumming with a kind of palpable radiance... you could almost see the dancing particles of light around her." When Siddons shows that nothing is what it seems, the revelation is almost inevitable. Yet she cannot be surpassed in evoking a kind of life peculiar to the South, with its emphasis on grace, good manners and stoic endurance. Her fans will find Siddons's narrative charisma intact and blooming.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From AudioFile
Islands is a Southern saga about lifelong friends who call themselves the Scrubs. The core members grew up together in Charleston; with their spouses they share a shambling Carolina beach house where they spend vacations and holidays together and share high points and low. Anne Siddons is like a juggler keeping eight wheeling torches effortlessly in air while telling a story and whistling Dixie. This seems to be a tale of lucky, loving friends and the changes time brings, until things take a Gothic turn. Not the kind of reader who would let you mistake a Kentucky accent for a Carolina one, Kate Fleming is warm, engaged, and thoroughly convincing, and does this entertainment to a buttery turn. B.G. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Siddons is the best-selling author of 14 novels, and her work is often lauded as moving and powerful. How about smarmy and lame? How else to describe her latest, set in the Carolina Low Country. Head of an agency devoted to helping handicapped children, Anny Butler, long resigned to being single, meets Lewis Aiken when she brings one of her clients to the free clinic he operates. A longtime womanizer with a notorious reputation, Lewis is instantly reformed upon meeting Anny, sweeps her off her feet, and immediately introduces her to his stalwart inner circle, dubbed the Scrubs. Although they profess disdain for the avarice and materialism of contemporary culture, they are forever putting away cases of high-end champagne, in between dining on goose and caviar, all of which is consumed in any number of fabulous homes. Let's see, there's the ocean-front beach house, the country manor, and the perfectly decorated in-town residence. Nonetheless, Anny considers herself a world-class bohemian because she is given to riding motorcycles (meticulously restored, of course) while bellowing, "Aiyee," which is what a few readers might yell about halfway through this novel. However, many other readers, including Siddons' legion of fans, will no doubt find her trademark mixture of high-mindedness and rampant consumerism a powerful draw. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"One of her best novels to date. . . . A beautifully detailed evocation of privileged lives." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"One of her best novels to date. . . . A beautifully detailed evocation of privileged lives." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.