NATURAL ELEMENTS: A NOVEL

Book ID/图书代码： 00500008B28386

English Summary/英文概要： Mother and daughter are choosing an assisted-living facility and have come to The Albany, a late-nineteenth-century Victorian mansion, the flagship property of the TranquilAge™ chain of nursing homes.

The mother, Joan—eighty years old, a gifted amateur pianist denied the pleasures of performance by arthritic hands—has recently been experiencing a rich inner world that she hides from her daughter, a world gained access through the (seemingly magic) pedals of her piano: a portal to adventure. She dreads the prospect of leaving her apartment, but her daughter has decided that she can no longer live on her own.

The daughter, Eloise—forty-eight, a hedge fund manager, two decades in commodities—long ago rejected the possibilities of motherhood and has lived enviably free of responsibility.

At her pressure-cooker job, Eloise has bought up $130 million (a quarter of the hedge fund’s money) of osmium reserves—a transition metal—based on a casual remark by her former lover, a French metallurgist, a genius of sorts, with whom she lived and whom she almost married in Paris in the 1980s.

He’s been working for years on the development of the compound, which will be tougher than diamonds for industrial use and is only months away from trials. If successful, it could more than double the value of the fund Eloise manages.

While mother and daughter are on the trip-of-a-lifetime to the South African capital of the old Orange Free State, the city of Joan’s girlhood, Eloise gets a frantic phone call. The price of osmium is in free fall; the fund is off-loading. . .

Fighting panic with a coherent strategy, Eloise puts in motion a bold gamble that risks all—her future, the fund, her mother’s well-being.

As the stories of mother and daughter intersect, each in a race against time—Joan struggling to live in the present (she cannot believe her days will end in an institution); her daughter racing at breakneck speed toward the precipice of disaster—the novel rushes to its stunning conclusion.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 愛情、親情、友情，當面臨利益衝突，是否還能維持原貌?
當深陷其中，夾在家人與事業間，你要如何做出取捨?(CL)

Awards/获奖情况：◆版權售出數十國的全球暢銷作家◆

版權已售:
Knopf (U.S.) March 2009, 416 pages; Weidenfeld & Nicolson (U.K.); Editions Lattès (France); Rowohlt (Germany); Einaudi (Italy); De Bezige Bij (Netherlands); Psichogios (Greece); Bertelsmann (Poland); Gummerus (Finland); Duomo Editiones (Spain)

Reviews “Impressive. . . a mature, inventive, ambitious novel. . . Mason brings a clear, inviting prose style that resists at every turn the temptation to be showy. To be as young as he is and already have three novels under his belt—the first two were The Drowning People (1999) and Us (2004)—is impressive enough, but to have written novels as good as these is far more so.”---Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“Ambitious. . . [it] weaves in elements of a corporate thriller and historical fiction flecked with fantasy. . . the South African passages are sublime and the mother-daughter relationship is well done.”---Publishers Weekly

“Rich in historical background and indelible characters. . . an ambitious and brutally honest view of love, family and aging.”---Booklist

About the Author/作者介绍： Richard Mason出生於南非，19歲的第一部小說《THE DROWNING PEOPLE》榮獲義大利最佳新作獎，譯成數十國語言。1999年Richard為了紀念夭折早逝的姊姊，便以她的名字設立基金會，提供獎學金，幫助南非兒童上學。

Format:TRADE PAPERBACK

Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE

Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE

Sales in other countries/其他国家销售情况：

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