Thanks to Geri Pope Bidwell and Gail McCormick, who have been supportive from the beginning, and to Holly MacArthur and Serena Crawford for rooting me on even when I abandon my work at Tin House.
Thanks to Ann Banchoff for her invaluable support and friendship—and to Joanna Goodman for knowing and loving me so well. Thanks to my amazing family (especially to Thomas Malarkey for his incredibly careful reading and insightful response), and to Mark, for weathering this storm with stability, strength, and love.
A very special thank-you to my agent, Tina Bennett, for her brilliance, intuition, and grace. I could not have dreamed up a better ally. And to my editor, Joy de Menil, for her vision and tenacity and very deep involvement—and for being an editor in the best and truest sense. Working with her has been an honor and an education.
And, finally, thanks to Random House for taking a chance on me.
Tucker Malarkey
An
Obvious
Enchantment
Tucker Malarkey grew up in San Francisco and lived for two years in Africa. She won the Michener Grant at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1995 and is a senior editor at Tin House, a literary magazine based in Portland, Oregon, and New York. This is her first book.
Critical acclaim for
An Obvious Enchantment
“A mystery whose clues are found in the pages of the Koran, a love story, and a quest that is nearly Ingrid’s undoing. It’s a stunning accomplishment for a first time novelist.” —The Seattle Times
“As the island air thickens, Ingrid’s academic universe collides with the reality of ancient feuds and modern compromises, making this novel, with its shades of Bowles, Maugham and Jacqueline Susann, an edifying—and, yes, enchanting—tale.” —Los Angeles Times
“Ingrid is smart, driven and attractive, an amateur sleuth on the trail of her own obsessions. She’s daring and determined, and a little naïve. She reminds me of all the reasons I once loved the fearless and compulsive world of Nancy Drew.” —Portland Mercury
“An exotic tale of escape and adventure with a sexy, feminist twist. . . . it’s an addictive book” —The Hartford Courant
“Other women dream of fleeing the country for a tropical island; anthropologist Ingrid Holtz does it—with a grant to follow her revered professor, Nick Templeton, to an island off the Kenyan coast. . . . You’ll be rivited by this romantic adventure novel.”
—Glamour
“A gripping novel pulls you in, keeps you turning the pages long after you should have turned out the light. Such a book leaves you feeling satisfied, yet wanting more. . . . Tucker Malarkey is a writer to watch. She writes beautifully . . . and has a way with words.”
—The Free Lance-Star
“Every once in a while, an author forces me to slow down and pay closer attention. . . . That is what I call reading. It happened again this week, when I began Tucker Malarkey’s debut novel, An Obvious Enchantment. . . . It put me in mind of a David Mamet play, wearing its intellect on its sleeve . . . readers will be caught up in the book’s overriding thematic concern: desire—its many manifestations, the pursuit of the same and its consequences.”
—Tacoma News Tribune
“The real pull of this tale is in the prose. Malarkey conjures a fine, ominous sentence . . . she deepens and enriches her tale with interesting characters, wonderfully odd stories, and a sense of impending mystery.” —The Providence Journal
“Malarkey creates a captivating character who commands the reader’s attention . . . a solitary, vulnerable and complicated figure. It is hard not to get caught up in the hypnotic swirl of the mystery.” —Chicago New City
“Religious mysticism, cultural anthropology and contemporary women’s issues charge Malarkey’s affecting first novel, an uncommon romance charting the restless intellect of an obsessive academic. Ingrid is a complex and seductive character . . . her preoccupation with truth invests this multifaceted, ambitious debut with a contemporary relevance.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“As the mystery unfolds, Malarkey raises intriguing questions about the actions that passions drive us to—with profound or searing consequences.” —Kirkus Reviews
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Tucker Malarkey
Reader’s guide copyright © 2001 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 2000.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Malarkey, Tucker
An obvious enchantment : a novel / Tucker Malarkey.
p. cm.
1. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction. 2. Americans—Travel—Africa—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Africa—Fiction. 4. Young women—Africa—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A424028 2000
813´.54—dc21
99-055334
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-102-8
v3.0
An Obvious Enchantment Page 35