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Listen to author Deborah Noyes speak about her interest in the subject of the Fox sisters and her motivation for writing Captivity.

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“A novel of beguiling characters that probes both belief and the veracity of emotion, this endlessly fascinating work should be considered by all fiction readers.”—Library Journal

“One of those books that you find maybe once, or if you are lucky, twice a year. A haunting story, exquisite writing, compelling characters, and a really interesting plot question. In this case, did the Fox sisters have a gift, or was it a hoax?... Deborah Noyes has the ability to make all of this very real with a delicate, ethereal beauty. She perfectly captures mood, description and the poetry of love. A marvelous writer. A marvelous book.”—The Moveable Feast
“Ghosts, sisters, religion and a young female locked away in her room. This is not a book to be read quickly and forgotten. It’s one of those books that you will find something new every time you read it. I was on the edge of my seat in anticipation from the very start. Noyes’ writing captures the era, the sites, sounds, and beliefs of a time long past. Very well done!”—Cain Book Reviews

“Captivity represents all that is good in literary fiction…It is original, creative and beautifully written…deeply insightful.”— The Lit Witch

“Well written and smoothly put together. I definitely recommend it to all those interested in ghost tales, especially historical ones.”— Star Shadow Blog

“If you are a patient reader you will be greatly rewarded with a thought provoking and insightful story.”—So Many Precious Books, So Little Time

“Offers hours of immersive reading. This is a great summer read and a vacation unto itself (no beach required)….Captivity’s great pace, interesting characters, and a potent combination of history and fiction make this book a Baby Toolkit top summer reading recommendation.”— BabyToolkit

“More about searching for what to believe in rather than finding truth.”— Webereading

“The climatic union of their stories is one of the best scenes in literature that I’ve read in a long time…I was holding my breath and on the edge of my seat in anticipation. To say anymore would be a spoiler. So, I’ll just leave you with my recommendation to read. Wrapped within Captivity are all the things that bind us - love, loss, grief, expectation and belonging…would make for a great book club selection.”—Babette’s Book Blog

“In the end…it doesn’t really matter what’s fact and what’s fiction. The novel is written in the third-person, but Noyes still describes what people are thinking and feeling enough for the reader to become invested in the characters. On top of that, she was able to pull me into the story and believe everything she’s presenting as complete truth. It’s rare that a novel can do that with as much ease as this one.”—Feminist Review

“Captivity by Deborah Noyes is a stroke of literary genius and written unlike any other novel I have read, which captures and at the same time commands the reader’s attention to even the smallest of details. . . Noyes has created a deeply profound and at times quite philosophical novel, which lends itself to contemplation and would make for a brilliant discussion group novel. Captivity is in a class all its own.”—rudpinne.com

“An amazing book…This is a book to be savored. In fact. I am going to keep this one and I know I will read it again…I cannot wait for Ms. Noyes next book.”—Broken TeePee

“Wonderfully lavish.”— Publishers Weekly

“Captivity represents all that is good in literary fiction…It is original, creative and beautifully written…deeply insightful.”—The Lit Witch

“I loved this one as much as you did…hypnotic yet piercing, pulls you in the same way the Fox Sisters pulled in the public,and poor Clara. Look forward to hand selling this one. Love the cover too.Yes, I do judge a book by its cover!” – Kathleen Creamer, Maine Coast Book Shop

“Told in a haunting, multi-narrative voice style, Captivity is a phenomenal, literate read packed with mystery, suspense, compassion, intrigue and fear threading stories within stories of this brilliant novel – indeed of those revolutionary times.”—Viviane Crystal. HNR

“Interweaving two tales of passion and deception, Noyes vividly evokes an era of intense fascination with both the wonders of science and the world of spirits. An engrossing novel about an extraordinary time.” - Barbara Weisberg, Author of Talking to the Dead: Kateand Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Knocked my socks off…Is it a ghost story? Maybe a little. Is a romance? Maybe a little. Maybe a little bit gothic in flavor. Definitely worth a read.”—BrainBlossom

“Captivity is haunting and evocative, a heartbreakingly poignant, emotionally luminescent tale of the prisons we build for ourselves out of expectation and desire. Beautiful and subtly powerful. I loved it.” –Megan Chance, author of Prima Donna and The Spiritualist

“With her crystalline prose Deborah Noyes creates characters who feel lit from within and at the same time she teaches the reader to ask different questions, expect different answers .
I love the many surprises of Captivity and the way the novel beautifully blurs the lines between the living and the dead, the true and the false.” –Margot Livesey

“The prose is exceptional, as exquisite as nature’s vast canvas, the emotional terrain of female limitations brightened with imagination born of frustration. This is a world created by an absence of choice, both Clara and Maggie’s opportunities so tightly wound as to suffocate lesser personalities. What might have become of such women born in a later generation?...Brilliant and searing, Noyes’s Captivity has captured the essence of the female dilemma in the late 1880s for those chronically unable to bow to convention. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, I willingly followed Clara’s lead, then Maggie’s, absorbing their strange world of limited expectations and unspoken ambition, diminished and at the mercy of men. This is an extraordinary, revelatory novel.”—Curledup.com

DEBORAH NOYES

CAPTIVITY

This masterful historical novel by Deborah Noyes, the lauded author of Angel & Apostle, The Ghosts of Kerfol, and Encyclopedia of the End (starred PW) is two stories:
The first centers upon the strange, true tale of the Fox Sisters, the enigmatic family of young women who, in upstate New York in 1848, proclaimed that they could converse with the dead. Doing so, they unwittingly (but artfully) gave birth to a religious movement that touched two continents: the American Spiritualists. Their followers included the famous and the rich, and their effect on American spirituality lasted a full generation. Still, there are echoes. The Fox Sisters’ is a story of ambition and playfulness, of illusion and fear, of indulgence, guilt and finally self-destruction.
The second story in Captivity is about loss and grief. It is the evocative tale of the bright promise that the Fox Sisters offer up to the skeptical Clara Gill, a reclusive woman of a certain age who long ago isolated herself with her paintings, following the scandalous loss of her beautiful young lover in London.
Lyrical and authentic—and more than a bit shadowy—Captivity is, finally, a tale about physical desire and the hope that even the thinnest faith can offer up to a darkening heart.

$15.95 / $16.95 CAN | FICTION Paperback | 6x9 | 352 pages

April 5, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-60953-045-7 | Carton Quantity: 20

EISBN: 978-1-93607-189-0

Here is how the Fox sisters teach the dead to speak. Maggie and Kate are giddy with fear on the mattress when Ma comes running with the candle. “We’ve found it out,” they cry, and Ma’s monstrous, flickering shadow rounds the bedroom wall. She nods hard, poor soul, hefting the candle higher, and her hand shakes. “It” is the rapping that’s robbed them of sleep and peace for so long, a hellish business, and who can bear it? Not Ma, surely.
She’ll have to, thinks Maggie, who is filled with fate as a sail is for going. Yes, they’ll go, she understands, from Wayne County with its brittle fields and trees—an unrelenting patchwork of brown and white to which spring takes its sweet time coming—and it won’t be long. Even Ma’s weary, pious face can’t prevent it. As if reading Maggie’s thoughts, her younger sister, Kate, springs out of bed and snaps babyish fingers. “Follow me,” she orders, and how can Maggie not? Who can take their eyes off Katie Dear, so like a blithe spirit herself, all hush and mischief in her threadbare shift? Snap snap, and then, in the shadow of Kate’s trailing hand, rap rap, audible as a heartbeat, deep inside the house.
“Here, Mr. Splitfoot.” Kate claps milky hands three times. “Do as I do.”
Rap rap rap.
The phantom makes the very walls quake, it seems. Beneath the spectral racket, Maggie hears the usual soft sounds of night, the ordinary unease of their little rented saltbox cottage: mice scrabbling in the walls, moaning March wind, creaking cold floorboards. These were lonely sounds before and chilled her, but now and suddenly she misses them. Almost.

Angel and Apostle is Deborah Noyes’ first novel. Her short fiction and reviews have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Boston Sunday Globe, Seventeen, The Washington Post Book World, The Chicago Sun-Times, Stories, The Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, The Bloomsbury Review, Boston Review, and other publications. She has also written and edited numerous books for children and young adults, including the award-winning teen anthology Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales. - Author photo by Courtney Wayshak.

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