Landfalls

Long-listed for the NBCC's John Leonard Prize
A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year

The gripping story of a dramatic eighteenth-century voyage of discovery from Naomi J. Williams

In 1785, the Lapérouse expedition left Brest with two frigates, more than two hundred men, and overblown ideals and expectations, in a brave attempt to circumnavigate the globe for science and the glory of France. This astonishingly inventive novel charts the course of their adventure.

Deeply grounded in historical fact but refracted through a powerful imagination, Naomi J. Williams's Landfalls follows the exploits and heartbreaks not only of the men on the ships but also of the people affected by the voyage—natives and other Europeans the explorers encountered, loved ones left waiting at home, and those who survived and remembered the expedition later. By turns comic, elegiac, and profound, Landfalls is an absorbing tale of the high seas and the world on the cusp of a new era.