Against the Wind
Against the Wind is an elegantly written story of relationships involving six principal characters, strands of whose lives braid together after a chance reunion among three of them. A successful environmental lawyer is forced to take himself to task when he realizes that everything about his work has betrayed his core beliefs. A high school English teacher asks her former high school love to take up her environmental cause. A transgender adolescent male raised by his grandparents struggles to excel in a world hostile to his kind. A French-Canadian political science professor finds himself left with a choice between his cherished separatist cause and his marriage and family. An accomplished engineer is chronically unable to impress his more accomplished father sufficiently to be named head of the international wind technology company his father founded. The Quebec separatist party's Minister of Natural Resources, a divorcée, finds herself caught between her French-Canadian lover and an unexpected English-Canadian suitor.
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Against the Wind is Jim Tilley's debut novel. He has published three full-length collections of poetry and a short memoir, The Elegant Solution. His writing has appeared in top literary journals, including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Southern Review. In 2008 he won Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry. Jim earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard University. During his twenty-five-year career in insurance and investment banking, he wrote several prize-winning papers on finance and investments. He has recently published original mathematics research in various academic journals. He resides in Bedford Corners, New York.
http: //www.jimtilley.net/
The writing is brilliant and economical, especially about the environment, and there's all sorts of information here for the taking, but essentially this is a novel of character. And a very good one.
--Library Journal
Tilley handles decadeslong character arcs with empathy, resulting in a resonant and humanistic novel.
-- Kirkus Reviews
Against the Wind is an intricate and elegantly compelling novel, notable for both its political and personal acuity. Jim Tilley writes with deep feeling for his characters and great command of his fascinating materials.
-- Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes
Against the Wind is a big old-fashioned novel with contemporary concerns: gender, adultery, wind energy, business acquisitions. But at its heart, Jim Tilley's debut novel is about the ageless concerns of love and loss and hope that we all share.
-- Ann Hood, author of Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food
Poet Jim Tilley's compulsively readable debut novel, Against the Wind, is a rumination on how the past stretches its long fingers into the present. Set in Canada and the U.S., the novel tells the story of Ralph, who is coming to terms with old rivalries and lost love. Told mostly from Ralph's point of view, and touching on such topical issues as the environment (wind energy) and transgender parenting, this absorbing and tender new novel offers us a view into the male psyche and reminds us of the difficulty of being a man in a culture that judges us all too harshly.
-- Cai Emmons, author of Weather Woman
In this contemporary novel of manners, the personal, the professional, and the political are inextricably intertwined. Tilley writes with insight and clarity about people we recognize and situations that hit close to home. Whether he's writing about changing relationships or chronicling a complex international business deal, Tilley writes with insight and clarity about people and situations we recognize. An important novel about characters facing the winding-down of their professional lives and the approach of life's third act.
-- John Van Kirk, author of Song for Chance
Politics--personal and environmental--form the colorful canvas upon which Jim Tilley paints Against the Wind, a novel that squarely faces the issues of today: the breakdown of families, the struggles to accept a transgender child, and the international policies and rivalries of global energy industries.
-- Anne D. LeClaire, author of The Halo Effect and The Lavender Hour
