Publication Date: 27/01/2011 ISBN: 9780670918447 Category:

Caribou Island

David Vann

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication Date: 27/01/2011 ISBN: 9780670918447 Category:
Paperback / Softback

£15.99

Quantity:

Description

On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, a marriage is unravelling.

Gary, driven by thirty years of diverted plans, and Irene, haunted by a tragedy in her past, are trying to rebuild their life together. Following the outline of Gary’s old dream, they’re hauling logs out to Caribou Island in good weather and in terrible storms, in sickness and in health, to patch together the kind of cabin that drew them to Alaska in the first place.

Across the water on the mainland, Irene and Gary’s grown daughter, Rhoda is starting her own life. She fantasizes about the perfect wedding day, whilst her betrothed, Jim the dentist, wonders about the possibility of an altogether different future.

From the author of the massively-acclaimed Legend of a Suicide, comes a devastating novel about a marriage, a couple blighted by past shadows and the weight of expectation, of themselves and of each other. Brilliantly drawn and fiercely honest in its depiction of love and disappointment, David Vann’s first novel confirms him as one of America’s most dazzling writers of fiction.

Publisher Review

Gets to places other novels can't touch * New York Times * An extravagantly gifted and moving writer * Sunday Times * Wields an unforgiving, elemental power that is breathtaking to read * Independent on Sunday * Beautiful, richly atmospheric . . . deserves to consolidate Vann's position among America's literary high flyers * Evening Standard * The prose here frequently achieves a quite astonishing beauty * Daily Telegraph * A novel of fine artistry and stark emotional truth - full of our darkest currents and faintest sounds * The Times * A writer to read and reread * Economist * Beautifully written and bitterly funny * Financial Times * Caribou Island is a scant 300 pages, and written in prose as pellucid as the rivers he used to fish as a boy. But it says so much: about men and women, about marriage, about the desperate gap between who we want to be and who we are * Observer *

Book experts at your service

What are you looking for?

A recommendation
Something specific
  • Mr B's Recommendation Station
  • Fill in the three questions below, along with your name and email address, and our book experts will be in touch soon with their personal recommendations

  • I'm after something specific
  • Tell us about the book, author or subject you're looking for, along with your name and email address and our book experts will be in touch as soon as possible