The difference

Resource Information

The work The difference represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Vancouver Public Library, Britannia Branch (Open with Limited Services). This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The difference

Statement of responsibility

Marina Endicott

Creator

• Endicott, Marina, 1958-

Author

• Endicott, Marina, 1958-

Subject

• Difference (Psychology) -- Fiction
• Electronic books
• Fathers -- Death -- Fiction
• Half-sisters -- Fiction
• Historical fiction
• Interpersonal attraction -- Fiction
• Merchant ships -- Fiction
• Miscarriage -- Fiction
• Adopted children -- Fiction
• Seafaring life -- Fiction
• Ship captains -- Fiction
• Voyages and travels -- Fiction
• Oceania -- Fiction
• Canadian fiction

Genre

• Fiction
• Historical fiction
• Electronic books
• Canadian fiction

Language

eng

Summary

A novel about two sisters who live aboard one of the last merchant ships to sail the South Pacific in the early 1900s. Thea and Kay are half-sisters, separated in age by more than a decade. After the death of their ailing father, a stern minister at a residential school in Canada, Thea is free to marry her love, the captain of a ship. But she cannot abandon her younger sister, so Kay comes aboard too, and together they embark on a life-changing voyage through the South Pacific and around the Cape of Good Hope. At the heart of The Difference is one crystallizing moment: Thea, after a devastating miscarriage, "purchases" a young boy from an island in Micronesia for four tins of tobacco, adopting him as her own. The repercussions of this rash act reverberate through the novel. In gorgeous prose full of fascinating detail about shipboard life, Endicott shows us a rapidly vanishing world in all its wildness and wonder, and its darkness, prejudice, and difficulty too. She also brilliantly illuminates our own times through Kay's constant examination of the idea of "difference"--between people, classes, continents, cultures, customs, species. A breathtaking tour-de-force by one of our most celebrated authors, a writer with the astonishing ability to bring a past world to vivid life while subtly revealing the moral complexity of our own

Cataloging source

NLC

Dewey number

C813/.6

Index

no index present

Literary form

novels