Eden's Clock

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1906 San Francisco earthquake
A01=Norman Lock
America
Author_Norman Lock
based on real people
Category=FBA
Category=FC
Category=FV
Civil War veteran
clockmaker
early 20th century
Edisto Island
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_historical-fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
famous authors as characters
horologist
horology
Jack London
literary canon
Manifest Destiny
national identity
Orphan Train Movement
racism
railroad
speech disability
train travel
United States history

Product details

  • ISBN 9781954276383
  • Dimensions: 127 x 190mm
  • Publication Date: 14 Aug 2025
  • Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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A disabled Civil War veteran makes an epic, westward journey toward a fateful encounter with author Jack London, only hours before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake

Rendered mute at the Battle of Gettysburg, Frederick Heigold returns to Dobbs Ferry, New York, where he marries a resolute suffragist and resumes his vocation as a clocksmith. Bereft after she dies in a freak accident, he accepts a commission to repair the enormous clock on the San Francisco Embarcadero, but the routine railway journey becomes a six-month odyssey. Finally reaching the Pacific, after having survived imprisonment, shipwreck on Edisto Island, and run-ins with assorted roughnecks and thieves, he happens upon novelist Jack London drinking in the Palace Hotel bar—just before one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history.

Eden’s Clock, the twelfth and final stand-alone book in The American Novels series, calls into question the American belief in individualism to shape our destiny when confronted with irrepressible, chaotic forces.

Norman Lock is the author of The Old Man and the Heath: A Novel and Stories, the dozen volumes of The American Novels series, the short story collection Love Among the Particles, and additional novels, short fiction, poetry, and stage and radio plays. Among other honors, he has won The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and has been longlisted three times for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.

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