Caribou Island

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.

ISBN 067091844X   Pages 304 ISBN13 9780670918447 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 207 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd   Published in London Imprint Viking   Height (mm) 198 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 129 Publication date 27 Jan 2011   Spine width (mm) 18 DEWEY 813.6   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

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

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