Marianne Wiggins

The Shadow Catcher: A Novel

Marianne Wiggins

• 2007 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2007 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 12.57

Narrated in the first person by a reimagined writer named Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher begins in Hollywood, where top producers are eager to sentimentalize the complicated life of Edward Curtis as a sunny biopic: “It’s got the outdoors. It’s got adventure. It’s got the do-good element.” Yet, contrary to Curtis’s esteemed public reputation as servant to his nation, the artist was an absent husband and disappearing father. Jump to the next generation, when Marianne’s own father, John Wiggins (1920-1970), would live and die in equal thrall to the impulse of wanderlust.

Were the two men running from or running to? Dodging the false beacons of memory and legend, Marianne amasses disparate clues—photographs and hospital records, newspaper clippings and a rare white turquoise bracelet—to recover those moments that went unrecorded, “to hear the words only the silent ones can speak.” The Shadow Catcher, fueled by the great American passions for love and land and family, chases the silhouettes of our collective history into the bright light of the present.

Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel

Marianne Wiggins

• 2004 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 2003 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 12.54

This poetic novel, by the acclaimed author of John Dollar, describes America at the brink of the Atomic Age. In the years between the two world wars, the future held more promise than peril, but there was evidence of things unseen that would transfigure our unquestioned trust in a safe future.

Fos has returned to Tennessee from the trenches of France. Intrigued with electricity, bioluminescence, and especially x-rays, he believes in science and the future of technology. On a trip to the Outer Banks to study the Perseid meteor shower, he falls in love with…

Eveless Eden

Marianne Wiggins

• 1996 Orange shortlist
• Score: 6.46

Eveless Eden tells the story of a passionate love affair between a foreign correspondent for an American newspaper and the tough, sexy, talented photographer he meets at the site of an ecological disaster in Africa.

Noah swings between disillusion and romanticism, cynicism and faith, despair and hope, as he and Lilith pursue their adventure in Paris, London, at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and through the scandal of AIDS tainted blood in the orphanages of Nicolai Ceausescu’s Romania. Lilith’s fateful attraction to danger makes her vulnerable to the…