★★★☆

Blurb 介紹了主人公及故事背景。

背景拓展：

MacDonald Harris

Pseudonym of?Donald Heiney

Donald Heiney was born in South Pasadena in 1921. Seastruck from the time he read Stevenson at the age of twelve, he went to sea in earnest as a merchant marine cadet in 1942, sat for his Third Mate's license in 1943, and spent the rest of the war as a naval officer on a fleet oiler. After the war he earned a B.A. at Redlands and a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Southern California. In 1964 he lived with his wife and son in Salt Lake City where he taught writing and comparative literature.

Taking the pseudonym MacDonald Harris for his fiction, his first story appeared in?Esquire?in 1947. Since then he has published stories in?The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and?The Saturday Evening Post, as well as a number of literary quarterlies. His story "Second Circle" was reprinted in the 1959 O. Henry Collection.?Private Demons, his first novel, was published in 1961.?Mortal Leap, his second, was finished in the summer of 1963 in Rome.

His novel?The Balloonist?was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977. He received a 1982 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his entire body of work.

Heiney died in 1993, at age 71, at his home in Newport Beach, California.

The Balloonist

It is July 1897, at the northernmost reach of the inhabited world. A Swedish scientist, an American journalist, and a young, French-speaking adventurer climb into a wicker gondola suspended beneath a huge, red-and-white balloon. The ropes are cut, the balloon rises, and the three begin their voyage: an attempt to become the first people to set foot on the North Pole, and return, borne on the wind. Philip Pullman says in his foreword: "Once I open any of MacDonald Harris’s novels I find it almost impossible not to turn and read on, so delightful is the sensation of a sharp intelligence at work. In The Balloonist , we see all of his qualities at their best."