The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

“An affectionate homage,” this novel of Stevenson’s evolution into an adventure writer is “a loving reconstruction of an era of storytelling now lost” ( New York Times ). The young Robert Louis Stevenson, living in a boarding house in San Francisco in the nineteenth century while waiting for his beloved’s divorce from her feckless husband, dreamed of writing a soaring novel about his landlady’s adventurous and globe-trotting husband, John Carson—but he never got around to it. And very soon there