Fever: A Novel

<b><i>Mary Beth Keane, </i></b>named one of the <i>5 Under 35 </i>by the National Book Foundation, has written a spectacularly bold and intriguing novel about the woman known as &quot;Typhoid Mary,&quot; the first person in America identified as a healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever. <br><br>On the eve of the twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. Canny and enterprising, she worked her way to the kitchen, and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef. Sought after by New York aristocracy, and with an independence rare for a woman of the time, she seemed to have achieved the life she'd aimed for when she arrived in Castle Garden. Then one determined &quot;medical engineer&quot; noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked, and identified her as an &quot;asymptomatic carrier&quot; of Typhoid Fever. With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman. <br><br>The Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother Island, where she was kept in isolation from 1907 to 1910, then released under the condition that she never work as a cook again. Yet for Mary - proud of her former status and passionate about cooking - the alternatives were abhorrent. She defied the edict. <br><br>Bringing early-twentieth-century New York alive - the neighborhoods, the bars, the park carved out of upper Manhattan, the boat traffic, the mansions and sweatshops and emerging skyscrapers - <i>Fever </i>is an ambitious retelling of a forgotten life. In the imagination of Mary Beth Keane, Mary Mallon becomes a fiercely compelling, dramatic, vexing, sympathetic, uncompromising, and unforgettable heroine.