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A construction worker is chased through the night by a shady local businessman whose dog he has stolen; a Wild West re-enactor is engaged in a long-running affair with the Indian 'squaw' who slays him on the battlefield every year; a boy is tasked by his father to rid the farm of cats. Playing out against the rugged backdrop of the untamed West, these stories are populated by characters who are toughened by life but still tender enough to bleed, to cry, to care, and to dream. With its taut plotting and calloused sensibility, Dog Run Moon is written deep in the American grain, and yet Callan Wink's humour, empathy and layered storytelling creates a fictional world entirely his own. This remarkable debut reminds you just how effortlessly powerful good writing can be.
August is an average twelve year old - he likes dogs and fishing, and doesn't even mind early morning chores on his family's farm. When his parents' marriage falls apart and he has to start over in a new town, he tries hard to be an average teen - playing football and doing his homework - but he struggles to form friendships, and when a shocking act of violence pushes him off course once more, he flees to rural Montana. There, as he throws himself into work on a ranch, he comes to learn that even the smallest of communities have secrets and even the most broken of families have a bond. Beautifully written and unfolding against an epic American landscape, August is a compelling, authentic and poignant story of the joys and traumas that irrevocably shape us all.
Part coming-of-age story, part mystery, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is a quirky and utterly charming debut about a community in need of absolution and two girls learning what it means to belong.
Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in. (p. 20) Funny yet horrifying, improvisational yet highly distilled, unflinchingly violent yet tender and elegiac, Michael Ondaatje’s ground-breaking book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a highly polished and self-aware lens focused on the era of one of the most mythologized anti-heroes of the American West. This revolutionary collage of poetry and prose, layered with photos, illustrations and “clippings,” astounded Canada and the world when it was first published in 1969. It earned then-little-known Ondaatje his first of sever...
Set in the wake of Hurricane Maria, Xavier Navarro Aquino's unforgettable debut novel follows a remarkable group of survivors searching for hope on an island torn apart by both natural disaster and human violence. Camila is haunted by the death of her sister, Marisol, who was caught by a mudslide during the huracán. Unable to part with Marisol, Camila carries her through town, past the churchyard, and, eventually, to the supposed utopia of Memoria. Urayoán, the idealistic, yet troubled cult leader of Memoria, has a vision for this new society, one that in his eyes is peaceful and democratic. The paradise he preaches lures in the young, including Bayfish, a boy on the cusp of manhood, and Morivivi, a woman whose outward toughness belies an inner tenderness for her friends. But as the different members of Memoria navigate Urayoán's fiery rise, they will need to confront his violent authoritarian impulses in order to find a way to reclaim their home. Velorio--meaning "wake"--is a story of strength, resilience, and hope; a tale of peril and possibility buoyed by the deeply held belief in a people's ability to unite against those corrupted by power.
A captivating debut, introducing a spirited young heroine coming of age in coastal Maine during the early 1960s. When her mother disappears during a weekend trip, Florine Gilham's idyllic childhood is turned upside down. Until then she'd been blissfully insulated by the rhythms of family life in small town Maine: watching from the granite cliffs above the sea for her father's lobster boat to come into port, making bread with her grandmother, and infiltrating the summer tourist camps with her friends. But with her mother gone, the heart falls out of Florine's life and she and her father are isolated as they struggle to manage their loss. Both sustained and challenged by the advice and expectations of her family and neighbors, Florine grows up with her spirit intact. And when her father's past comes to call, she must accept that life won't ever be the same while keeping her mother vivid in her memories. With Fannie Flagg's humor and Elizabeth Stroud's sense of place, this debut is an extraordinary snapshot of a bygone America through the eyes of an inspiring girl blazing her own path to womanhood.
SOON TO BE A MAJOR GLOBAL NETFLIX ADAPTATION STARRING JULIA ROBERTS, KEVIN BACON, ETHAN HAWKE AND MAHERSHALA ALI *A THE TIMES #1 BESTSELLER* *THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* *A BARACK OBAMA SUMMER READING PICK 2021* 'Easily the best thing I have read all year' KILEY REID, AUTHOR OF SUCH A FUN AGE 'Intense, incisive, I loved this and have still not quite shaken off the unease' DAVID NICHOLLS 'I was hooked from the opening pages' CLARE MACKINTOSH 'Simply breathtaking . . . An extraordinary book, at once smart, gripping and hallucinatory' OBSERVER _______ A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong Amanda and Clay he...
In a world of the future, people exist in a perpetual state of rehearsing evacuations, and one man's rehearsal involves leaving his parents behind. A firespotter knows all too well that where there's smoke, there's fire - but fails to spot the blaze that consumes half her family. Then there's the Custer impersonator who takes his role in a re-enactment too literally, and too far. And the massage therapist struggling to help a veteran whose biggest regret is tattooed across his back. With award-winning reportage, memoir, fiction and photography, Granta has illuminated the most complex issues of modern life through the refractory light of literature. Feel the sting of betrayal via new writing by Ben Marcus, Janine di Giovanni, Samantha Harvey, Colin Robinson, Jennifer Vanderbes, Callan Wink, John Burnside, Andre Aciman and more.
From dusty rural villages to northern ghettos, 12 Million Black Voices is an unflinching portrayal of the lives that many black Americans lived in the 1930s. It is a testament to the strength of black communities throughout America.
A novel about a former soldier in Big Sky Country whose life is spiraling out of control, from the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts, who is "among the most arresting and fascinating [writers] of his generation" (San Francisco Chronicle). In McGuane's first novel set in his famed American West, Patrick Fitzpatrick is a former soldier, a fourth-generation cowboy, and a whiskey addict. His grandfather wants to run away to act in movies, his sister wants to burn the house down, and his new stallion is bent on killing him: all of them urgently require attention. But increasingly Patrick himself is spiraling out of control, into that region of romantic misadventure and vanishing possibilities that is Thomas McGuane's Montana. Nowhere has McGuane mapped that territory more precisely—or with such tenderhearted lunacy—than in Nobody's Angel, a novel that places him in a genre of his own.