Mettle

by G.F. Michelsen

G. F. Michelsen's novel Hard Bottom was acclaimed as "a beautifully written, impeccably crafted book" by Publishers Weekly, while the Washington Post hailed his To Sleep with Ghosts as "compelling"... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1584656476
• ISBN13: 9781584656470
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Lovely, unusual novel

Michelsen excels at writing about the astounding relationship between a man and his boat. In Mettle, the boat is an ocean freighter called the Debenture, and its captain, Lorenzo Fuller, has faced tragedy in any number of other relationships. I was unable to put this book down until I found out whether Lorenzo and his Debenture wind up on the rocks. The writing is luscious, the locales (Cape Cod, shipboard, and an African town roiling with dissent and corruption) so carefully evoked that you can smell them. Michelsen slips between his protagonist's past and present in alternating chapters, with the result that you get a highly three-dimensional sense of Lorenzo's worldview and emotional evolution. Other characters -- the near-mutinous engineer, the lost love on Cape Cod, the wayward son -- have enough memorable idiosyncrasies to make them real. This book manages to be tense and lyrical at the same time. I highly recommend it.

Buy This Book NOW!

I was blown away by this wonderful book, and this writer, whom I have never heard of before. I bought it because I am originally from Harwich, on Cape Cod, and I loved the description of the Cape in both the summer and the off season. The writing is beautiful. I really liked the romance, and the woman, Grace, who disappears. "She did not tell him about the big fish she dreamed about at night, gliding in the lightless valleys of the Pacific, pincushioned with dead harpoons, deeper than her nightmares even." Yum! I was even excited by the ships part of the story, though I don't know that much about boats, even though I'm from the Cape. It reminded me of Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim", only I liked the writing in "Mettle" better. I'm going to go and check out this writer's other books!