It was just a sneakier death, a crueler death, in a way, because it always seemed to come by surprise.' Never does Mary suspect that she might be carrying the contagion that has been killing the people nearest her. Yes, Mary Mallon had noticed that many members of the upper-class families she cooked for fell ill with fevers, but 'the old country was full of death. In Keane's assured hands, she becomes a sympathetic, complex and even inspiring character.

The real Mary Mallon, however, was an Irish immigrant supporting herself in New York with her talent for cooking. In the imagination of Mary Beth Keane, Mary Mallon becomes a fiercely compelling, dramatic, vexing, sympathetic, uncompromising, and unforgettable heroine.There are some lives too complex to remain a footnote in history, and as Mary Beth Keane proves with her intriguing second novel, Typhoid Mary was one of them-the woman so roundly reviled to this day for supposedly spreading typhoid fever during the epidemic of the early 1900s. 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- Fever is an ambitious retelling of a forgotten life. Yet for Mary-proud of her former status and passionate about cooking-the alternatives were abhorrent. 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. With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman. Then one determined “medical engineer” noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked, and identified her as an “asymptomatic carrier” of Typhoid Fever. 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. Canny and enterprising, she worked her way to the kitchen, and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. On the eve of the twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Mary Beth Keane has written a spectacularly bold and intriguing novel about the woman known as “Typhoid Mary,” the first person in America identified as a healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever. From the bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes, a novel about the woman known as “Typhoid Mary,” who becomes, “in Keane’s assured hands…a sympathetic, complex, and even inspiring character” ( O, The Oprah Magazine).

Fever a novel by mary beth keane