Preservationist

"Noe says, -I must build a boat.

-A boat, she says.

-A ship, more like. I'll need the boys to help, he adds as an afterthought.

-We're leagues from the sea, she says, or any river big enough to warrant a boat.

This conversation is making Noe impatient. -I've no need to explain myself to you.

-And when you're done, she says carefully, we'll be taking this ship to the sea somehow?

As usual, Noe's impatience fades quickly. -We'll not be going to the sea. The sea will be coming to us."

In this brilliant debut novel, Noah's family (or Noe as he's called here)-his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law-tell what it's like to live with a man touched by God, while struggling against events that cannot be controlled or explained. When Noe orders his sons to build an ark, he can't tell them where the wood will come from. When he sends his daughters-in-law out to gather animals, he can offer no directions, money, or protection. And once the rain starts, they all realize that the true test of their faith is just beginning. Because the family is trapped on the ark with thousands of animals-with no experience feeding or caring for them, and no idea of when the waters will recede. What emerges is a family caught in the midst of an extraordinary Biblical event, with all the tension, humanity-even humor-that implies.

Praise for Dave Maine and The Preservationist:

"The Preservationist is funny, tender, intelligent, energetic, irreverent, and worshipful. It is an enormous juggling act of families, animals and faith, and it kept me engaged through every page. I imagine Noah would be enormously pleased with David Maine's novel, I know I was." - Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto

"I loved The Preservationist. It's a funny, convincing amplification of the Biblical story."

- Tracy Chevalier, author of The Virgin Blue

"Once they were strangers to us. Distant as specks. No more! Thanks to David Maine it is in the daily, the ordinary "Noah family" the "what's for breakfast?" the aching feet, the little insults or winks, the slap on the back, the gathering of insects in cupped hands that we know them now as we know ourselves, the family next door preparing to face the unknown, the "I am certain," the magnificent, the awful, the wonderful, the weird, the big. The Preservationist was great. Very moving and enjoyable and clever."

- Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine

"Maine simply, wisely, asks himself what it was like to be there, "when the rain began to fall." For me, the strength of this book lies not so much in its entertaining characters as in the wonderful details of this old brand-new world.¿In just these details, small and large, Maine convinces us that the world Noah worked so hard to save is indeed worth preserving."

- Jincy Willett, author of Winner of the National Book Award

"If, like me, you've always wondered how Noah actually built his ark, and managed to fit all those animals on it, and survived forty days and forty nights of rain and flood, The Preservationist is the book for you. A funny, cheeky, irreverent, wonderfully original first novel, informed both by Biblical history and Dave Maine's joyous imagination."

- Jim Fergus, author of One Thousand White Women

"The Preservationist is delightfully wry and witty, throwing light on man's-and woman's-eternal folly in the name of God and of love. More, this retelling of an ancient tale is a great deal of fun to read, its characters etched with an acid affection that makes them unforgettable."

- India Edghill, author of Queenmaker

The Washington Post - Melvin Jules Bukiet

Through the family's ordeal, Maine's eight characters in search of an acre begin to come to self-consciousness, concluding with the post-landing episode in which Noe's sons witness their father's drunken nakedness. As Adam and Eve once fell through guilt in the Garden, Noe's sons fall in the new Eden through shame. They have become the kind of people who ponder their salvation and their neighbors' drowning and ask, "Why me, and not them? Why them, and not me?" These are questions that couldn't be answered then and can't be now, and that's why they remain eternally valid.

David Maine was born in 1963 and grew up in Farmington, Connecticut. He attended Oberlin College and the University of Arizona, and has worked in the mental health systems of Massachusetts and Arizona. He has taught English in Morocco and Pakistan, and since 1998 has lived in Lahore, Pakistan with his wife, novelist Uzma Aslam Khan.