A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

A Pulitzer Prize Finalist: This collection of moving short stories is "a treasure trove of lush scene setting in faraway times and places" (Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle).

On a fateful flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son.

At times funny and irreverent, always moving and deeply urgent, these stories--among them a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize winner--cap a fifteen-year project. From the Nile's depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-racked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are tales of ecstasy, epiphany, and what the New York Times Magazine called the "struggle for survival . . . hand to hand, word to word," by "one of the finest prose stylists in American fiction."

A Library Journal Best Book of 2020

Daniel Mason is a Northern California native who grew up in a family of musicians. He went to Harvard University for biology and the University of California, San Francisco for medicine. His first novel, The Piano Tuner, was a national hit in 2002 and has since been translated into 27 languages. A Distant Land, The Winter Soldier, and A Register of My Journey Upon Earth are among his other publications, and his work has featured in Harper's Magazine and Lapham's Quarterly. He resides in the Bay Area of San Francisco.