Fieldwork

"Fieldwork is as fascinating as an ethnographer's private journal, as entertaining as a finely plotted thriller." -- John Wray, author of Canaan's Tongue When his girlfriend takes a job as a schoolteacher in northern Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, working as little as possible for one of Thailand's English language newspapers. One evening, a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story. A charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead -- a suicide -- in the Thai prison where she was serving a fifty-year sentence for murder. Motivated first by simple curiosity, then by deeper and more mysterious feelings, Mischa searches relentlessly to discover the details of Martiya's crime. His search leads him to the origins of modern anthropology -- and into the family history of Martiya's victim, a brilliant young missionary whose grandparents left Oklahoma to preach the Word in the 1920s and never went back. Finally, Mischa's obssession takes him into the world of the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life becomes a battleground for two competing, and utterly American, ways of looking at the world. Vivid, passionate, and offbeat, Fieldwork is a novel about fascination and taboo -- scientific, religious, and sexual. "Impeccable research and a juicy, intricate plot pay off in this perfrectly executed debut."-- Kirkus Mischa Berlinski studied classics at the University of California at Berkeley and at Columbia University and has worked as a journlaist in Thailand. He lives in Rome. William Dufris has gathered thirteen Earphones Awards through AudioFile magazine, which named him "One of the Best Voices at the End of the Century."