From the author of the international bestseller The Last Station , a stirring novel about the adventurous life and tragic literary career of Herman Melville.   As The Passages of H. M. opens, we see, through the eyes of his long-suffering wife Lizzie, an aging, angry, and drunken Herman Melville wreaking domestic havoc in his unhappy New York home. He is decades past his flourishing career as a writer of bestselling tales of seagoing adventures like Typee and Omoo . His epic but ungainly novel Moby-Dick was meant to make him immortal, but critics scoffed and readers fled. His days are spent trudging the docks of New York as a customs inspector and contemplating his malign literary fate. But within him is stirring, perhaps, one great work yet—the tale of a handsome sailor in the Napoleonic Wars, undone by one moment of uncontrollable rage . . . Lizzie’s chapters alternate with third-person accounts of Melville’s crowded life: his shipping off to sea on a merchant vessel as an impoverished young aristocrat; his fateful voyage on a whaling ship; his desertion in the Marquesas Islands and sojourn with cannibals—a great adventure and polymor­phous sexual idyll—and his instant fame as a novelist; his fateful encounter and soul-deep friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne; and the long years of physical decline and liter­ary obscurity. Jay Parini creates a Melville who is at once sympathetic and maddening, in sync with the vast forces of the universe and hopelessly impractical and abstracted. And one who, in thought and deed, is unambiguously attracted to men—a surmise well supported by the known biographical facts but still sure to cre­ate controversy. Parini penetrates the mind and soul of a liter­ary titan, using the resources of fiction to humanize a giant while illuminating the sources of his matchless creativity. Herman Melville’s tormented soul comes to life through the prose of his wife, Lizzie, about whom very little is known in real life but who comes across as “a marvelous creation, a smoldering prisoner of bitterness and devotion, resentment and affection” ( Washington Post ). Any fictionalized biography of an elusive writer such as Herman Melville is certain to generate some controversy. Some critics found Parini’s version of Melville’s inner musings to be too much guesswork, although this may amount to a criticism of the genre as a whole. Most reviewers agreed, however, that Parini remains faithful to what facts we know of Melville and that Melville’s life told through his wife’s eyes renders the writer human and accessible, if sometimes robbed of drama. While some readers may prefer to intuit Melville’s mind from the writer’s own inspired works of fiction, others will find The Passages of H.M. to be a fine, insightful work of historical biography. The lives of writers fascinate poet, biographer, and critic Parini, the author of novels about Tolstoy (The Last Station, 1990) and Walter Benjamin (Benjamin’s Crossing, 1997). He now portrays the “inscrutable” American original, Herman Melville, in a novel as mercurial as its subject. Parini has Melville’s smart yet thwarted wife, Lizzie, narrate drolly in homebound chapters, while Melville tells epiphanic tales of his adventures at sea, the wellspring for his fiction. We also see him stoking a “bonfire of language,” alarming his idol, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and experiencing a vision in the Holy Land. The daughter of a judge, Lizzie knew Melville was tempestuous, but she was unprepared for how demoralizing his drinking, depressions, and rage would become. Parini astutely contrasts the claustrophobia of the struggling Melville household with the boundless ocean and Melville’s wild South Sea escapades, including his nearly mythic infatuations with alluring and unavailable young men. Awkward in patches, intermittently grim and witty, and catching fire the closer he comes to Melville’s molten core, Parini’s bold and mesmerizing novel ultimately deepens the mystery of Melville’s incandescent genius. --Donna Seaman “Part literary biography, part novel, The Passages of H.M . turns the author’s life into an adventure of its own. . . .  Melville’s life is such a gripping tale, it almost made me want to pick up my old copy of Moby-Dick and actually finish it this time.”— Entertainment Weekly   “Parini’s creative reanimation of Melville injects humanity into a tormented soul whose bright, promising early days peaked dramatically before curdling into a mass of dejection.  Melville’s adventures make for good reading . . . Parini manages a generous and appreciative assessment.”— Publishers Weekly “An appealing portrait of a questing, turbulent spirit.”— Kirkus Reviews     U.K.   “[Parini’s] eminently readable narrative convincingly fills in hitherto dark places….The Passages of Herman Melville will not replace the standard biographies; it will, however, add flesh to their bones. It’s very well done.”— Financial Times   “[A] compelling novel… W