The Philosopher's Apprentice - Morrow, James

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Résumé :
A brilliant philosopher with a talent for self-destruction, Mason Ambrose gratefully accepts an offer no starving ethicist could refuse. He must travel to a private tropical island and tutor Londa Sabacthani, a beautiful, brilliant adolescent who has lost both her memory and her moral sense in a freak accident. Londa's soul is an empty vessel--and Mason's job will be to fill it. But all is not as it seems on Isla de Sangre. Londa's reclusive mother is secretly sheltering a second child whose conscience is a blank slate. Even as the mystery deepens, Mason confronts a frightening question: What will happen when Londa, her head crammed with lofty ideals and her bank account filled to bursting, ventures out to remake our fallen world in her own image?

Biographie:
Having arrived on the planet in 1947, James Morrow spent his adolescence in Hillside Cemetery, not far from his birthplace in Philadelphia, pursuing his passion for 8mm genre moviemaking. Before going off to college, he and his friends used their favorite graveyard location for a half-dozen fantasy and horror films, including adaptations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Tell-Tale Heart.After receiving a BA degree from the University of Pennsylvania and an MAT from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Morrow spent a decade working for public school systems in Massachusetts, then began channeling his storytelling urge toward the creation of satiric novels. His acerbic assessment of the nuclear arms race, This Is the Way the World Ends, was the BBC's selection as best science-fiction novel of 1986. His next dark comedy, Only Begotten Daughter, chronicling the escapades of Jesus's divine half-sister in contemporary Atlantic City, won the World Fantasy Award.Throughout the 1990s Morrow devoted his energies to killing God, an endeavor he pursued through three interconnected novels: Towing Jehovah (World Fantasy Award), Blameless in Abaddon (New York Times Notable Book), and The Eternal Footman. Having grown sick of his Creator, and vice-versa, the author next attempted to dramatize the birth of the scientific worldview. Critic Janet Maslin called The Last Witchfinder an inventive feat. A thematic sequel, The Philosopher's Apprentice, was praised by NPR as an ingenious riff on Frankenstein. Morrow's most recent irreverent epic, Gal?pagos Regained (Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire), narrates the adventures of Charles's Darwin's fictional zookeeper.The author's stand-alone novellas includes City of Truth (Nebula Award), Shambling Towards Hiroshima (Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award), The Asylum of Dr. Caligari (Shirley Jackson Award finalist), and The Madonna and the Starship. Morrow's work has been translated into thirteen languages. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife Kathryn and three adopted dogs....

Sommaire:

James Morrow is the author of nine previous novels, including The Last Witchfinder. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania.