The Big Bang Symphony

This is a story about three women – a geologist, a composer, and a galley worker – who have taken jobs in Antarctica. As they each fall in love and into trouble, their lives become more and more entwined – until one crisis binds them in friendship for life.

Finalist: Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Award
Finalist: Ferro-Grumley LGBT Fiction Award
Finalist: Lambda Literary Lesbian Fiction Award
Finalist: ForeWord Book of the Year, LGBT Fiction

Review Excerpts


"Well-paced and plotted, the novel centers around three women who go to the Antarctic then return home, their lives forever changed by their experiences with each other and with the desolate ice-world where they meet....Carefully-delineated characters and a tightly-constructed plot drive this unique at times slyly humorous narrative about a world few have ever seen, a world that draws in people and lives like a beautiful, sometimes deadly, ice-vortex. In the collision of art and science that is the novel, Bledsoe - part novelist, part science writer and part intrepid adventurer - shows off a finely-honed imagination and sensibility that, along with her deep passion for the wild places of the earth, inspire as they uplift." -- EDGE Magazine

"...captures the southern continent’s blend of mystery, menace and majesty with ravishing immediacy....Bledsoe’s narrative of the women’s stint in polar isolation, confronting the emotional puzzles of their lives, is riveting in itself. But the subplots – most centrally Rosie’s self-exile from her family and Mikala’s childhood on a 1960s commune – add sublime texture to this crystalline novel." -- Book Marks

"Bledsoe skillfully orchestrates the lives of an intriguing set of characters gathered at an outpost in Antarctica....Bledsoe uses the locale's incredible beauty and high potential for drama, danger, and self-discovery for insights small and great as the women react to the sun's breathtaking glint on the ice and, conversely, to the power of an unmerciful environment that so quickly turns deadly." -- Booklist

“In this compelling novel, Bledsoe captures the deadly beauty of the southernmost continent….A well-balanced humdinger of a story keeps this unusual novel hurtling along like a skidoo on the ice." -- Kirkus Reviews

"For everyone mesmerized by Werner Herzog's Antarctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World, Lucy Jane Bledsoe's rippingly good new novel The Big Bang Symphony provides a return trip into the minds of the scientists and misfits who choose to work in the extreme cold of the McMurdo Station...[Bledsoe] keeps things moving. She packs her book with lively, libidinous, oddball characters, the very most alluring and dangerous of which is the beautifully realized frozen landscape. Don't miss this chance to feel like you've spent a season there." -- Stephen Bottum, Band of Thebes

"This is rich storytelling, full of gutsy characters, drama, and transformation, reminding us of the awesome and ultimately untamable power of nature, and, as vulnerable, highly social animals, our place in it." --Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters



Biography


Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of four novels, a collection of short fiction, a collection of narrative nonfiction, and six books for kids. (See bibliography below.) When she’s not writing, she’s sea kayaking in Alaska, backpacking in the Rockies, backcountry skiing in the Sierras, or biking the Berkeley/Oakland hills.

Lucy has traveled to Antarctica three times, as a two-time recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers in Antarctica Fellowship and once as a guest on the Russian ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov. She is one of a tiny handful of people who have stayed at all three American stations in Antarctica. She has also stayed in a number of field camps, both on the coast and in the Transantarctic mountains, where scientists are studying penguins, climate change, and the Big Bang.

She is the recipient of the 2009 Sherwood Anderson Prize for Fiction, the 2009 Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, as well as a California Arts Council Fellowship, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and an American Library Association Stonewall Award. Her stories have been published in dozens of journals, including Arts & Letters, Shenandoah, ZYZZYVA, Bloom, Hot Metal Bridge, Terrain, and Fictional International. Her novels have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, and German, and her stories into Dutch and Chinese.

Lucy believes storytelling is pretty much the most important thing humans do, and so, for many years, she taught adult literacy throughout the Bay Area. She published a number of collections of her students’ work, including Goddesses We Ain’t: Tenderloin Women Writers. She loves to cook and has recently been serving dinners at a free meals program in Berkeley.



Bibliography


Fiction
The Big Bang Symphony: a novel of Antarctica, Terrace Books, 2010
Biting the Apple, Da Capo, 2007
This Wild Silence, Alyson, 2003
Working Parts, Seal Press, 1997
Sweat: Stories and a Novella, Seal Press, 1995

Nonfiction
The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic, Terrace Books, 2006

Children's
How to Survive in Antarctica, Holiday House,2006
The Antarctic Scoop, Holiday House,2003
Cougar Canyon, Holiday House, 2001
Hoop Girlz, Holiday House,2002
Tracks in the Snow, Avon Books,1997
The Big Bike Race, Avon Books,1995

Email Lucy

Lucy in RedRoom

Lucy on Facebook


Lucy on Petermann Island, Antarctica Photo by Pat Mullan

The Big Bang Symphony

Biting the Apple

The Ice Cave

Selected Works

Fiction
The Big Bang Symphony, a novel
Three women--a composer, a galley cook, and a climate change geologist--take jobs in Antarctica where they fall in love and into trouble.
Biting the Apple, a novel
A moment of simultaneous grace and injustice leads to the unraveling of three lives.
This Wild Silence, a novel
Two sisters unveil the truth about their brother's disappearance.
Working Parts, a novel
Lori, an adult bicycle mechanic, learns to read -- and much more.
Sweat: Stories and a Novella
Sports and adventure stories.
Nonfiction
For Kids
How to Survive in Antarctica
Armchair travel to Antarctica.
The Antarctic Scoop
Victoria saves an endangered continent.
Hoop Girlz
River wants to make the WNBA!
Cougar Canyon
A mountain lion prowls into an urban neighborhood.
Tracks in the Snow
Two girls survive in a mountain storm.