Perhaps best known for her two story collections—Ship Fever, a National Book Award winner, and Servants of the Map, a Pulitzer Prize finalist—Andrea Barrett is also the author of six novels rich in metaphor and the intricacies of both science and history. These include The Middle Kingdom, The Voyage of the Narwhal, and, most recently, The Air We Breathe. Indeed, the first collection didn’t appear until after her fourth novel. The progression makes a kind of sense. Her stories—expansive and generous, often covering great swaths of time and varying geographies—read like a novelist’s stories. Half of the pieces in Servants of the Map are fifty pages or more, and none is fewer than twenty.

Barrett’s fiction presents a flawless equipoise between the internal and external worlds of the characters it investigates, not only teaching us about nineteenth-century mapmaking, epidemic prevention, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the discovery of genetics, or early “cures” for tuberculosis, but also revealing exactly what it was like to be a human being in time—how it feels to lose part of your hand to X-ray experiments or part of your nose to arctic exploration. Despite the incredible range of the fiction, it’s remarkably free of anachronisms. The simple deployment of a word like chilblains, which has been around since before Shakespeare, can launch us back with ease to a cold open plain in eighteenth-century Sweden.