She presents her latest conjuring at a four-concert SFJazz Center engagement May 5-7 that focuses on music from her new Nonesuch album “Mélusine.”īased on a folkloric legend that circulated widely around Western Europe in the late Middle Ages, “Mélusine” tells the story of a maiden cursed as a child by her mother to turn into a half-serpent every Saturday. The lure may be universal, but the 33-year-old Salvant’s gift for transforming shadowy archetypes into extraordinary music sets her in a rarified realm. I think we are all drawn to mythologies.” “The stories are vibrant and colorful,” the three-time Grammy Award-winning jazz vocalist and composer wrote in an email. 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.Perhaps it’s her gargantuan talent, or a fervid childhood imagination fueled by fairytales and folk legends, but somewhere along the line Cécile McLorin Salvant acquired an abiding fascination with myths and monsters. 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. Along the way, the story is peopled with unforgettable characters: missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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