大學二年級在圖書館裏發現的,首先是被封麵吸引住,其次是名字:Tourmaline,寶石的一種,中文裏叫"碧璽".

讀完第一段就入瞭迷,開始不分晝夜地看.直到現在,這也是我讀過最好的英文,一串串漂亮的詞穿起來,簡直像閃爍發光的珠寶,太美瞭.

"An extraordinary novel of travel and discovery...Tourmaline affectionately evokes the spirit of a handful of lives and the soul of a magnificant island paradise."——Laura Ciolkowski,Chiago Tribune

"Tourmaline unspools like a movie,a lush journey as seductive as a Bertolucci film,but one tinged with Hitchcock,its bright sunlit tale pierced with an ever-present faintly ominous undertow."Helen Eisenbach,Newsday

"One of the most gifted writers today.Joanna Scott is brilliant,huge-hearted,devastating.In Tourmaline,she's at the top of her form."——Michael Cunningham,author of The Hours.

內容簡介:Editorial Reviews From Library Journal:

Poetic prose enriches this evocative, carefully observed but slight story of Americans abroad. The tiny, remote, once mineral-rich Italian island of Elba, Napoleon's penultimate exile and infamous for the daddy of all palindromes, is nowhere tourists ventured in the mid-1950s. But for unemployed Murray Murdoch, husband to Claire and father of their four energetic boys, it's where the whole family can live cheaply while he undertakes grandiose fortune-making schemes. Setting his sights on finding the rare Elban tourmaline, borrowing to buy worthless land at triple its value, he comes afoul of and elderly and eccentric Englishman named Francis Cape, a failed Napoleon biographer nursing unrequited love for young Adriana Nardi, daughter of a prominent family. Cape imagines a rival in Murdoch, which leads to bizarre and fatal consequences. The sometimes Gothic tale is told in various voices, primarily those of Claire and son Ollie, who returns seeking answers to what happened when he was a child.

Joanna Scott is the author of six previous fictions,including critically acclaimed Make Believe;The Manikin,which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize;and Various Antidotes and Arrogance,which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award

Scott has won Guggenheim and MacArthur grants and teaches creative writing at the University of Rochester.