Lucy Jane Bledsoe
The Big Bang SymphonyThis 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
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