To lose your mother at the age of eight. To spend five years at sea, circumnavigating the globe, unsure whether you will ever return home. To watch your favourite daughter die and almost never speak her name again. To survive years of incurable illness and crippling stomach pains. To live with the fear that the knowledge inside you could wreck your marriage and destroy all that your society holds dear. To have twenty years of work nearly eclipsed by a younger man. To create a new kind of faith that will change the world. Emily Ballou's beautifully imagined verse-portrait of Charles Darwin's life saves the man from the legend, bringing to light a fragile and deeply-felt humanity, capturing the textures of his work and dreams, the noise and touch of his wife and children, his inner doubts and questions. It is the story of a man at the brink of a revolutionary theory; a man whose dogged, lifelong determination to pursue the truth, despite the cost to his health, never undermined his intense feelings of devotion to those he loved. (Publisher's Blurb)
