The Signature Of All Things

In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery: a glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed

"This kind of storytelling is rare — one in which an author can depict the particulars of a moss colony as skillfully as she maps the landscape of the human heart."  -  Lizzie Skurnick, NPR

Exquisitely researched and told at a galloping pace, The Signature of All Things soars across the globe — from London to Peru to Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam, and beyond. Along the way, the story is peopled with unforgettable characters: missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad. 

But most memorable of all, it is the story of Alma Whittaker, who — born in the Age of Enlightenment, but living well into the Industrial Revolution — bears witness to that extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas. 

“A rip-roaring tale… unlike anything Gilbert has ever written… Its prose has the elegant sheen of a nineteenth-century epic, but its concerns… are essentially modern.”   -  The New York Times Magazine

Written in the bold, questing spirit of that singular time, Elizabeth Gilbert’s wise, deep, and spellbinding tale is certain to capture the hearts and minds of readers.