5/26/2023 0 Comments Fever book mary beth keane![]() ![]() ![]() She was soon identified as the first known asymptomatic, or healthy carrier of the disease. A man named George Soper, a sort of medical detective, tracked the source of the infection to Mary. ![]() ![]() Various people for whom she cooked suffered bouts of typhoid fever. Between 18 she worked as a cook in the homes of a number of wealthy families, and later in a hospital. But this time the immigrant’s ordeal is harsher, and her fate more complicated than that of the characters in the slow, graceful pages of “The Walking People.” Here the action has shifted from the recent past to the early 1900s, and the immigrant in question is Mary Mallon of County Tyrone - better known to us as Typhoid Mary. In “Fever,” the Irish immigrant in New York is again the focus of the story, and as before the twin themes of social exclusion and exile are explored. At the same time it’s a long, fond portrait of a family. That novel is less about the anomalous position these itinerant peddlers occupy in Irish society than it is about the consequences of concealing from a child the circumstances of her birth. Mary Beth Keane’s first novel, “The Walking People,” could stand as a historical sequel to her new novel, “Fever.” The earlier book is the story of two Irish sisters who immigrate to New York in the early 1960s, accompanied by a young man who belongs to the “walking people,” also known as the “traveling people” or tinkers. ![]()
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