The Celestials: A Novel

ISBN: 1935639552

Author: Shepard, Karen

Condition: Used

The Celestials is a historical novel of immigration, multiculturalism, labor, community and exclusion, alienation and reinvention, and our country's peculiar history and relationship with all those things. It's about our shared sense that we're all aliens of some kind--at home in no place. In June of 1870, seventy-five Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams, Massachusetts, to work for Calvin Sampson, one of the biggest industrialists in that busy factory town. Except for the foreman, the Chinese didnt speak English. They didnt know they were strikebreakers. The eldest of them was twenty-two. Combining historical and fictional elements, The Celestials beautifully reimagines the story of Sampsons Chinese experiment and the effect of the newcomers threatening and exotic presence on the New England locals. When Sampsons wife, Julia, gives birth to a mixed-race baby, the infant becomes a lightning rod for the novels conflicts concerning identity, alienation, and exile.