Ursula, Under

A daring novel of culture, history, and heredity, hailed as “extravagant and absorbing” (Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife)

A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the attention of the entire country. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft. It is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in the rescue of this little girl, the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband.

The novel takes a breathtaking leap back in time to visit Ursula’s most remarkable ancestors: a third-century-B.C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned playmate of a seventeenth-century Swedish queen; Professor Alabaster Wong, a Chautauqua troupe lecturer (on exotic Chinese topics) traveling the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century; her great-great-grandfather Jake Maki, who died at twenty-nine in a Michigan iron mine cave-in; and others whose richness and history are contained in the induplicable DNA of just one person—little Ursula Wong.

Ursula’s story echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that her very existence—like ours—comes to seem a miracle. Ambitious and accomplished, Ursula, Under is, most of all, wonderfully entertaining.