Adam's Story

by Sharon Marcus

"You will be the chronicler," Adam Hubble tells his new wife Alia who fulfills her obligation some years later by writing Adam's Story. Composed in alternating sections of verse and prose, this minutely observed account documents the ecstasy and obsession eroding the last two years of Adam's life. Set largely in the United States and the Middle East during the first intifada at the end of the nineteen eighties, the story she tells is in effect, a symphony in two movements. An unfurling rhapsody moves through Adam's prophetic sense of what he takes as his divinely inspired mission to make peace for the Palestinians, and his equally obsessive need to reconnect meaningfully with his own children, lost to him in an unhappy divorce. The personal, the political and prophetic stride past in loose verse and poetic prose while Adam is driven by a hopelessly quixotic and ultimately tragic conflict, the war between private conscience and public authority. Torn from the ordinary by his flight of the soul, Adam inevitably loses this fiercely contested battle on both the inner and outer planes of his reality.

394 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is a founding editor of Public Books and the author of the award-winning Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton) and Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London.