In America Free online reading

National Book Award, Fiction, 2000

The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag's best-selling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Emma Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate power. In this enthralling audiobook - once again based on a real story - Sontag shows us our own country on the cusp of modernity.

In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland's greatest actress, travel to California to found a "utopian" commune. Maryna, who has renounced her career, is accompanied by her small son and husband; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her.

The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California - as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification - constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the émigrés go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage.

In America is a big, juicy, surprising audiobook - about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater - that will captivate listeners from the first chapter. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant achievement.