The Crossing

by Andrew Miller

Overview

“In pristine, elegant prose,” the Costa Prize–winning author “creates an indelible portrait of a mysterious woman” and her quest for total independence (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Maud enters Tim’s life as no one else could: by falling straight past him, seemingly to her death, then standing up and walking away. From that moment on, Tim is desperate to love her, rescue her, reach her. Yet there is nothing to suggest Maud has any need of him. She is already complete. A woman with a talent for survival, she works long hours and loves to sail—preferably on her own.
When Maud finds her unfulfilling marriage tested by unspeakable tragedy, she attempts to escape from her husband and society’s hypocrisy. In her quest, she encounters the impossible and pushes her mind and body to their limits.
A wise and thrilling portrait of an irreducible heroine who asks no permission and begs no pardon, The Crossing explores a truth that’s absent from most contemporary literature.

“An extraordinary portrait of an enigmatic woman.”—The Guardian

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609453473
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/10/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Andrew Miller is one of Britain's premier authors. His novel Pure won both Costa's Novel of the Year and Book of the Year award, and was selected by The Guardian as one of the ten greatest historical novels, alongside such masterpieces as War and Peace and Wolf Hall. His novel Oxygen was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Editorial Reviews

In an article in The Guardian…Miller explained that The Crossing was written in answer to his midlife frustration with fiction, a sense that too often it "had become more competent than interesting, more decorative than urgent, more conventional than otherwise." In seeking to cleave closely to urgency and truth, he drew inspiration from, among other things, Walter Benjamin's assertion that "it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it" and from Iris Murdoch's 1961 essay Against Dryness, "where she calls for a renewed sense of 'the opacity of persons,' and the need for fiction…to resist offering consolation based on inadequate models of personality and society." To admit the opacity, the insoluble mystery, of each individual is, in these information-addled times, unfashionable in the extreme; but, as Socrates avers and Tolstoy reminds us, all we can know is that we know nothing. What literature can offer in place of false knowledge, The Crossing suggests, are signs and wonders—an openness that's both inspiration and challenge.

The New York Times Book Review - Claire Messud

Praise for The Crossing and Andrew Miller

“...whether he sets a story in the 18th century or the present, and no matter his subject, [Miller’s] prose is highly distinctive in its detached precision. He writes like a scientist, utterly shorn of sentimentality, patient and cleareyed.”
—Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

"Maud emerges as a memorable figure, a misunderstood woman who has yet to discover her own brilliance and tenacity."
—The New Yorker

“The beauty of this subtle novel is that it derives enormous power from small details, such as the discovery of a heart-shaped hair clip, and Maud's encounters with children on a distant island.”
—Shelf Awareness

"[T]aut, crystalline, with not a wasted word. Toss aside the "Girl" mysteries – this one is more grown up, and far less forgettable."
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“In pristine, elegant prose, Miller creates an indelible portrait of a mysterious woman and her tragic quest.” 
—Kirkus (Starred Review)

“There’s a beauty in the precision of Miller’s writing . . . With every turn of the page, the reader becomes more and more intrigued by Maud herself.”
—The Independent

“Miller’s writing is assured, often poetic.”
—The Financial Times

“Rich and delicate . . . Maud, and questions about Maud, will linger in your mind long after you close this remarkable novel.”
—The Guardian

“In Pure, Miller has a gift for characterization and ability to summon up a world that convinces absolutely.”
—The New York Times Sunday Book Review

“Pure is richly evocative of a time, place, and man in dangerous flux.
It is brilliance distilled.”
—The Telegraph

“Elegantly written and intricately constructed…Pure is an artful,
carefully wrought novel.”
—The New York Times

“Reading Oxygen, you have the suspicion that Andrew Miller’s writing might be capable of anything.”
—The Observer

From the Publisher

★ 02/15/2017
Sailing is the bond that connects the spectacularly mismatched pair of Tim Rathbone and Maud Stamp. With his family wealth, Tim is a dreamy dilettante who dabbles in music. Maud, the only child of two remote schoolteachers, is a practical, unsentimental scientist whose sole note of whimsy is a tattoo on her arm reading, "Sauve qui peut" (Every man for himself). Their early years together are spent companionably purchasing, then outfitting and sailing, an old yacht. When their daughter comes along, however, Maud, absorbed in her work as a medical researcher and showing little interest in child care, is content to leave Tim with the parenting responsibilities. Then tragedy strikes and the couple's tenuous bond snaps. When Tim moves back with his parents, Maud becomes unmoored. Given leave from work, she sets sail on a solo sea voyage that tests her stores of bravery and ingenuity. VERDICT What starts off as a bittersweet love story turns into Castaway in a novel of ineffable sadness, dramatic misadventure, and exceptionally fine storytelling. Highly recommended.—Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Library Journal

★ 2016-10-05
The fantastic voyage of a haunted woman.In the opening scene of Miller’s (Pure, 2012, etc.) graceful, absorbing novel, Maud Stamp and Tim Rathbone, members of their university’s sailing club, are at work repairing a boat when suddenly Maud falls 20 feet onto “rubbled brick” and, although at first she appears dead, opens her eyes, gets up, and walks 15 steps before collapsing. Tim—“tall, blue-eyed, patrician”—shocked that she is alive, rushes her to a hospital and, in short order, becomes her lover. He's fascinated by this self-possessed woman who lives in Spartan rooms, who “does not do banter,” who (like Miller’s protagonist in 1997's Ingenious Pain) seems not to suffer, or even to feel, pain, and who has on her forearm a tattoo, Sauve Qui Peut: every man for himself. The lovers seem complete opposites: after earning a degree in biology, Maud takes a position at a pharmaceutical company, assigned, ironically, to oversee trials of a powerful painkiller. Tim, born into wealth and privilege—Miller delightedly skewers his family’s pretensions and hypocrisies—occupies himself by playing one of his precious collectible guitars; after their daughter is born, he happily becomes a stay-at-home dad. But Tim feels increasingly frustrated with Maud’s coldness, her apparent distance from him and their child. Who is this woman, he wonders, who “entered his life with the force of myth”? Maud is, indeed, a cipher: is she a stereotypical scientist, focused on chemical rather than human interactions? Does she have Asperger’s? Or is she hiding some deep, unspeakable grief, a more likely possibility that emerges in the second half of the novel, when she flees from a devastating tragedy to sail across the Atlantic, alone. In palpable detail, Miller depicts Maud’s immersion in a watery, ravaging world, at once alien and threatening. There is something Shakespearean in her journey: in her battle against nature’s wrath; the dreamlike settlement, inhabited by children, where she washes ashore; and her overwhelming desire to confront the unbearable. In pristine, elegant prose, Miller creates an indelible portrait of a mysterious woman and her tragic quest.

Kirkus Reviews