From Publishers Weekly
Two lonely hearts try to protect an endangered species of bird and the paradisiacal island on which they live from mysterious agents of destruction in Anderson's dreamy, lushly written second novel (after 1996's Hidden Latitudes). Christian, a disenchanted, 30-something Swiss man haunted by his experiences as a Red Cross worker in Bosnia, comes to Egret Island, "a short green poem of a place" off the coast of Mauritius, to work for Fran, a middle-aged, outwardly brusque American naturalist seeking to restore the island to its original, untouched state and the endangered mourner-bird to its previous strength. Like Christian, who left behind a pregnant lover, Fran has also loved and lost; she tries to confine herself to a cerebral approach to work and life, blunting her sexual frissons and painful flashbacks through Darwinian logic. But as an unseen menace stalks the island, seeking to destroy both the birds and their caretakers, Fran and Christian are propelled toward romantic union—a well-worn conceit given some resonance by the novel's governing idiom of biology, instinct and the odd "stochastic factor, or... Darwin's wink": the nonsensical gap in biological progress that throws predictability off course. Readers will find the plot distantly secondary to the novel's rich emotional palette, as Anderson captures the expansive beauty of Mauritius and the nuances of human character with languid, sensual and occasionally violet prose. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
In an elegiac and haunting tale of healing and survival, two emotionally wounded biologists find solace in each other as they struggle to save a rare bird from the brink of extinction. Situated just off the coast of Mauritius, Egret Island is a fragile environment. Within the refuge provided by its primitive conditions, Fran, an American naturalist, and Christian, her Swiss assistant, withdraw to atone for losses in which they unwittingly played a part. For Fran it was the death, perhaps murder, of her lover and previous assistant, while Christian copes with the loss of the woman he loved while working for the Red Cross in war-torn Bosnia. As tortured as they are by their pasts, however, they must also confront a sinister future as the island's inhabitants, and nature, conspire to destroy everything they are trying to protect. Luminously written, with a hypnotic sensuality that fairly shimmers, Anderson's deeply affecting tale of the beauty and brutality of nature pits the forces of evolution against the fragility of emotion. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
"A love story, a war story, an ecological adventure, a biological poem, and a treatise on the fragility of life--Darwin's Wink has it all. The writing is so incantory that it almost floats off the page. In Fran, Alison Anderson has created a strong, flawed, and utterly believable heroine.... Like the elusive, bejeweled mourning bird it celebrates, this book will waken its
readers to unexpected wonders. A beautiful book. I loved it."
- Molly Giles, author of Iron Shoes

The author of the critically acclaimed Amelia Earhart novel Hidden Latitudes offers a beautifully crafted story about two naturalists, both damaged by ghosts from the past, who find love as they work to save a rare bird species off the coast of Mauritius--and fend off a powerful townsman who is threatened by their presence.



About the Author
Alison Anderson lived in Greece, France, England, and Switzerland before moving to San Francisco, where she now works as a writer and translator. She is the author of Hidden Latitudes (1996), a novel of Amelia Earhart based on Anderson's yearlong sailing trip on a 30-foot ketch, which was nominated for the San Francisco Chronicle's Best Book of the Year and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award.



Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1


At dusk the woman stands at the edge of the island to watch the birds in flight above the lagoon. Hers is not a usual, distant, appreciative watching; she has a trained eye, and she looks for signs in the birds' flight, for the slow, imperceptible markers of evolution.

She is in a place where evolution can be witnessed in a bird's lifetime, not far from the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Two generations of Dutch and Portuguese explorers transformed an uninhabited fifteenth-century paradise into a laboratory for naturalists for centuries to come. There were the plant and animal species they brought: tamarind, eucalyptus, banyan, casuarina and flame trees, sugarcane; cats, dogs, mongooses, rats, asses, monkeys. Humans. There were the species they destroyed or endangered: entire forests, the habitat for hundreds of small wild creatures. Their most famous victim: the dodo bird, Rapphus cucullatus.

The woman's name is Fran, a sturdy, practical name, like the woman herself. She has been studying the evolution of birds all her life. She is a trained naturalist, a behavioral ecologist, efficient and unsentimental. She accepts the inevitability of death but refuses the inevitability of extinction. She is closer to fifty than to forty, an unpopular age, although for her, age is a man-made convenience, a sort of Linnaean classification system used to facilitate assumptions. She sees aging in more Darwinian terms, and her own age troubles her only for its childlessness; the years have given her a wise and youthful strength. She is sun-hardened, life-hardened, life-ripened, with short graying hair, and sharp blue eyes that can spot a kestrel a mile away. She is a woman with an instinct for the coming hurricane and a loneliness like a bastion, impregnable.

Now she turns, and the young man is there. Ah, you've finished unpacking, she calls. A friendly statement, formal nonetheless; she does not know what to say to this stranger in her domain.

His name is Christian; he looks older than his thirty-some years. He is unmarried, perhaps childless, sunburnt, burnt-out, life-shattered, a gentle lad with brown eyes behind wire frames, a small neat mustache, and a shock of dark hair, a shock of dark experience. Christian is Swiss. He used to be a delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross, and he had tried to save humans. He had been trained to believe in the inevitability of war, but his experience left him with a deep scar of failure: as if he were witnessing his own extinction. A survivor from a land of refugees, he has been driven to the island to survive himself, to seek protection behind this woman's knowing fortress---although he does not know this yet. He believes he is seeking refuge among the birds, to work with Fran on Egret Island.

Egret Island lies half a mile off the coast of Mauritius: a hatchling of coral reef, separated from its mother island by a lagoon swept daily by the trade winds of the Indian Ocean. Egret has been designated a nature reserve by the Mauritian government; Fran is the field worker charged by an independent foundation with returning the island to its prehuman condition. She will replace the exotic with the endemic; she will restore birds and small reptiles to their natural habitat. And she will try to save the mourner-bird from extinction.

There are no egrets on Egret Island. After the Portuguese and the Dutch came the French and the British, and the egrets, too, vanished.


Copyright 2004 by Alison Anderson

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Two naturalists find unexpected love as they work to save a rare bird species on an island off the coast of Mauritius. Both are haunted by old ghosts and hardened by past tragedies. Fran mourns the mysterious death of her Mauritian lover; Christian, a former International Red Cross worker, has recently arrived from Bosnia, where the woman he loved disappeared during the war. As the two of them slowly learn to trust again, they must also contend with strange threats to the island that put everything at risk." Darwin's Wink is a story that weaves emotional explorations of love, fertility, evolution, and survival - all against an exotic, lush island setting. This is a book for the readers of Andrea Barrett, Barbara Kingsolver, and other writiers who marry story and nature.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Two lonely hearts try to protect an endangered species of bird and the paradisiacal island on which they live from mysterious agents of destruction in Anderson's dreamy, lushly written second novel (after 1996's Hidden Latitudes). Christian, a disenchanted, 30-something Swiss man haunted by his experiences as a Red Cross worker in Bosnia, comes to Egret Island, "a short green poem of a place" off the coast of Mauritius, to work for Fran, a middle-aged, outwardly brusque American naturalist seeking to restore the island to its original, untouched state and the endangered mourner-bird to its previous strength. Like Christian, who left behind a pregnant lover, Fran has also loved and lost; she tries to confine herself to a cerebral approach to work and life, blunting her sexual frissons and painful flashbacks through Darwinian logic. But as an unseen menace stalks the island, seeking to destroy both the birds and their caretakers, Fran and Christian are propelled toward romantic union-a well-worn conceit given some resonance by the novel's governing idiom of biology, instinct and the odd "stochastic factor, or... Darwin's wink": the nonsensical gap in biological progress that throws predictability off course. Readers will find the plot distantly secondary to the novel's rich emotional palette, as Anderson captures the expansive beauty of Mauritius and the nuances of human character with languid, sensual and occasionally violet prose. Agent, Irene Moore. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews