Inner Sea — Zane Kotker

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  • Nov-2014
  • Levellers Press

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Description
Kotker returns this September with The Inner Sea: A Novel of the Year 100. A globalizing Rome has taken nations and tribes by force, and the loss of national and tribal identity leaves people adrift in an indifferent empire. To whom does one belong? An aging widow sends her former slave across the sea to fetch her granddaughter. A silver merchant dispatches his son on a trading journey around the Mediterranean, where Jews and Christians are pulling apart from each other. The Jews find themselves without their centralizing Temple and the Christians without their Son of God. Fatalists trust to the stars; Stoics and Epicureans to themselves. The two young people cross paths, bringing down the worlds of their parents and ultimately testing the wisdom of the man whom Rome calls Son of God-the emperor, Trajan.

With unobtrusive authority and deft skill Zane Kotker achieves the astonishing feat of making the richly various Mediterranean peoples of the year 100 AD as familiar to us as our neighbors. 
--Roger King, author of Love and Fatigue in America 

We come to love [her characters] in all their complexity and confusion, hoping along with them for a better world. This story will stay with you. 
--Susanne Dunlap, author of The Musician's Daughter 

Elegant, fast-paced. Its large cast of characters pulsates with life, inspiring the reader to meditate on the corruptions of power and the devastating consequences of military and religious warfare. 
--Herbert Leibowitz, Editor, Parnassus: Poetry in Review 

The Inner Sea is a wonderful feat of imagination and scholarship.... This phenomenally rich context [the Roman Empire near apogee] could easily prove overwhelming; fortunately, Kotker ... is a master of both pacing and restraint.... The Inner Sea's true protagonist, it turns out, is the magnificent chaos of imperial Rome itself; Kotker keeps us mesmerized with a hugely varied cast of secondary characters and with her terrific, vivid descriptions of the physical world they inhabit.... Kotker's talent for stagecraft is phenomenal; she doesn't just conjure up scenes but seems rather to channel them, right down to detail after fascinating detail.... Over all this richness presides the emperor Trajan, whom Kotker presents in a series of lovely, interstitial chapters.
--Fernanda Moore, Commentary

Zane Kotker's other novels include Bodies in Motion, A Certain Man, White Rising, and Try to Remember. She's the winner of a fiction grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and other honors.
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