Riverhead Books, 2013-10-01. Hardcover. Very Good. Prompt shipment, with tracking. we ship in CLEAN SECURE NEW boxes Very good in Very good dust jacket. First Edition.

Synopsis

A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed In The Signature of All Things , Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker—a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry’s brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father’s money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. As Alma’s research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction—into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose a utopian artist—but what unites this unlikely couple is a desperate need to understand the workings of this world and the mechanisms behind all life. Exquisitely researched and told at a galloping pace, The Signature of All Things soars across the globe—from London to Peru to Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam, and beyond. Along the way, the story is peopled with unforgettable characters: missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad. But most memorable of all, it is the story of Alma Whittaker, who—born in the Age of Enlightenment, but living well into the Industrial Revolution—bears witness to that extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas. Written in the bold, questing spirit of that singular time, Gilbert’s wise, deep, and spellbinding tale is certain to capture the hearts and minds of readers.

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Details

Bookseller: Robinson Street Books, IOBA (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #: H7MG00021
Title: The Signature of All Things: A Novel
Author: Gilbert, Elizabeth
Format/Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Used - Very Good
Quantity Available: 1
ISBN 10: 0670024856
ISBN 13: 9780670024858
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Place of Publication: New York
Date Published: 2013-10-01
X weight: 26 oz

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Robinson Street Books, IOBA

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Robinson Street Books, IOBA

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About Robinson Street Books, IOBA

We have been selling books for over 30 years via catalog and lists, as well as open shops. We closed our last open shop in 2003 and now operate out of our warehouse, which contains 500,000 books, journals, periodicals from the 16th Century to the present. We sell on-line as well as via lists and catalogs. We buy collections, accumulations, excess unneeded donations/duplicates, from Museums and Libraries for cash or credit. We have one of the largest collections of offprints in zoology, Botany, Molecular biology available for sale in the world

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Jacket: Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
First Edition: In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
New: A new book is a book previously not circulated to a buyer. Although a new book is typically free of any faults or defects, "new"...