Wiggins fits her lyrical prose to a distinctly rural, Southern cadence, easily blending the vernacular with luminous imagery, adding bits of poetry, passages explaining scientific phenomena, interpolations about the Scopes trial and even references to Moby-Dick, which serves as a leitmotif.--Publisher\'s Weekly.
Hypnotic and powerful, Evidence of Things Unseen constructs a heartbreaking arc through twentieth-century American life and belief..
Their lives have traveled with touching inevitability from their innocence and fascination with Things that glow to the new world of manmade suns.
And it is there, when Opal falls ill with radiation poisoning, that Fos\'s great faith in science deserts him.
But when the New Deal claims their farm for the TVA, Fos seeks work at the Oak Ridge Laboratory--Site X in the government\'s race to build the bomb.
Fos and Opal are forced to move to Opal\'s mother\'s farm on the Clinch River, and soon they have a son, Lightfoot.
A witty rogue and a staunch disbeliever in Prohibition, Flash brings tragedy to the couple when his appetite for pleasure runs up against both the law and the Ku Klux Klan.
Fos brings his new wife back to Knoxville where he runs a photography studio with his former Army buddy Flash.
On a trip to the Outer Banks to study the Perseid meteor shower, he falls in love with Opal, whose father is a glassblower who can spin color out of light.
Intrigued with electricity, bioluminescence, and especially x-rays, he believes in science and the future of technology.
Fos has returned to Tennessee from the trenches of France.
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.
This poetic novel, by the acclaimed author of John Dollar and Properties of Thirst , describes America at the brink of the Atomic Age.
Wiggins fits her lyrical prose to a distinctly rural, Southern cadence, easily blending the vernacular with luminous imagery, adding bits of poetry, passages explaining scientific phenomena, interpolations about the Scopes trial and even references to Moby-Dick, which serves as a leitmotif.--Publisher\'s Weekly
