The Voyage of the Narwhal and Servants of the Map, by Andrea Barrett (F BARR).

Barrett is an award-winning novelist who imagines how human emotions affected the work of botanists, doctors and other health care providers, explorers, surveyors and cartographers, most of whom worked during the 19th century.

The characters she creates in her first book, The Voyage of the Narwhal, reappear in the short stories of the second book. However, she weaves them in so subtly that you may be well into a story before recognizing the character or understanding that the family about which you are reading is related to the earlier character. And when the recognition occurs the story becomes much deeper. Her third book, Ship Fever, which is another collection of short stories, continues in the same vein. Each of the books stands alone beautifully, but taken together they truly are literary art.

Her most recent book, The Air We Breathe, also contains references to the previous three works, but, to me it was a much weaker work that I could easily have put down and not finished except I expected it to get better, so I persevered.