Shadows and Elephants, Vol. 1 Book

Russian-born mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky was notorious the world over for her psychic powers. One of the most scandalous women of the nineteenth century, she founded an international society that exists to this day and is indeed the mother of everything that is referred to as 'new age.' Accused of being an imposter, a forger, a delirious hashish smoker, a spy for the Czar and instigator of frauds, she was nonetheless venerated by the some of the most influential people of her day (including Thomas Edison and Abner Doubleday in New York City; W.B. Yeats and the young Mohandis P. Ghandi in London) as being a divine conduit to the world of the dead. Having never before been the subject of a novel, Edward Hower has combed through the facts and imagined her incredible search for enlightenment from Gilded Age New York City to India and Ceylon.

Hailed by The Philadelphia Inquirer as a writer whose work is "Breathtakingly fresh and gripping…weird, haunting, and magical," Hower infuses Blavatsky with intellect and determination, adds a personal dimension to the woman dubbed "the Priestess of the Occult," and exposes both the 'tricks' of her trade and her serious attempts to reach 'the other side.' No less fascinating is her partner, based on the Civil War hero Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who is plagued with personal guilt associated with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and seeks forgiveness from the deceased. Forced from his own country in his search for enlightenment, he eventually becomes known in the Orient as 'The White Buddhist' and is worshipped for his powers as a faith healer.

Remarkable in its sensuous recreation of colonial India and Ceylon, Shadows and Elephants is a lush historical novel about the cultural responses to the ravages of the Civil War; about the origins of occultism in America; and finally about a lasting friendship between a woman and a man that survives public ridicule, poverty, sexuality and time.


About the Author

Edward Hower is the author of four previous novels. His fiction and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Southern Review, Epoch, Transatlantic Review, and Smithsonian; his reviews in the nation's most prestigious book pages. He wrote Shadows and Elephants while on the second of two Fulbright Fellowships to India and has been awarded numerous writing grants. He lives in Ithaca, NY, and teaches at Cornell and Ithaca College.