Anne McDermid & Associates

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Toronto, Ontario
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Curiosity

"Curiosity is a delight. Set with marvels and rueful comedy, it's a warmly intelligent feat of historical sympathy. Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, with her dead-reckoning gaze, moves through these pages like a muddy-booted angel."
-Greg Hollingshead

"Joan Thomas takes a paleontologist’s soft brush to the fossil of Mary Anning. Curiosity’s examination of the class strata, the burgeoning ideas, and the interior life of her time is meticulous and deeply affecting. The traps of poverty and class, the gyrations Anning’s contemporaries performed to fit the fossil evidence to religious doctrine, even their calcified notions of women’s place in science and society, fall away to reveal the hidden life below: the human mind and heart excavated with delicate and devastating skill."
-Marina Endicott

Based on the life of a real, and most extraordinary, woman, Curiosity seamlessly blends history and fiction, passion and science in a breathtaking novel set in 19th-century Lyme Regis, England.

More than forty years before Darwin published of On the Origin of Species, a 12-year-old cabinet-maker's daughter named Mary Anning found the fossilized skeleton of a dolphin-like creature in the cliffs of Dorset, and spent a year chipping it from its millennia-old resting place. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this uncommon woman; indeed, she was perhaps the most important paleontologist of her day, even though her finds were named and exhibited by the “official” scientists – all of them men.

Henry de la Beche was the son of a gentry family, owners of a slave-worked estate in Jamaica where he spent his childhood. As an adolescent in England, he ran away from military college, and soon found himself living with his elegant, cynical mother in Lyme Regis, where he pursued his passion for drawing and painting the landscapes and fossils of the area. One morning on an expedition to see an astonishing discovery – a giant skeleton – he encountered a young woman unlike anyone he had ever met.

Curiosity is a richly imagined and beautifully written tale of two very different people and of a meeting that would lead them down paths neither could ever have imagined.

McClelland & Stewart, Canada, March 30, 2010

Longlisted for the 2010 Giller Prize

A Quill & Quire Book of the Year 2010

Longlisted forthe International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Shortlisted for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction

Shortlisted for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year

Praise for Curiosity

“Right from its powerful opening, the novel buffets readers with the inescapable momentum of waves against the Dorset cliffs…Thomas delivers: Curiosity is without question the best novel this reader has come across in the past year.”
-Quill & Quire

“Thomas handles beautifully the class-afflicted nuances of a doomed love story…”
-MORE Magazine

“What Thomas manages to create is rich to the point of decadence. She practically burrows into the characters. Hers is magnificent prose that appeals to all the senses without grandiloquence.”
-Toronto Star

"Thomas has proven she is not a one-book wonder. Reading Curiosity is like riding a time machine back to early 19th-century England...Lush prose, compelling narrative and vivid characters...one of the best books of the spring publishing season."
-Ottawa Citizen

"...a beautifully wrought, but non-divinely inspired, work of literary art."
-Winnipeg Free Press

"Thomas has written a timeless story, and an unforgettable one."
-Edmonton Journal

"Mary Anning as portrayed by Joan Thomas stands in her own right as a memorable figure, vulnerable and indomitable at the same time."
-National Post

"A beautiful, erudite, and deeply pleasurable work."
-The Walrus

"For a real page-turner, you will want to reach for Curiosity!"
-The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

Joan Thomas is the author of two highly-acclaimed novels. Reading by Lightning (Goose Lane Editions, 2008), a coming-of-age story set in World War II, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and was described by the jury as "a fabulous novel, full of grace and delicious discovery." It was also the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean), and was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Joan's second book, Curiosity (McClelland & Stewart, 2010), a fictionalization of the life of 19th century British fossilist Mary Anning, was praised by reviewers as "a beautiful, erudite, and deeply pleasurable work”. . . "a big juicy read" . . ."a thinking person's love story." It was longlisted for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, as well as being named a Quill and Quire Book of the Year and an Amazon.ca Book of the Month.

Prior to writing fiction, Joan was a longtime contributing book reviewer for the Globe and Mail. In 1996 she won a National Magazine Award for Personal Journalism for a piece published in Prairie Fire Magazine. She is the co-editor of two short fiction anthologies, Turn of the Story: Canadian Short Fiction on the Eve of the Millennium (House of Anansi Press, 1999) and The Journey Prize Anthology (McClelland & Stewart, 2010). She lives in Winnipeg.

Joan's website

Other titles by this author:

Reading By Lightning

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