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Caribou Island (Paperback)
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Caribou Island (Paperback)

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Price: £15.99
Paperback 304 Pages
Published: 27/01/2011
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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 information

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780670918447
Number of pages: 304
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 35 mm
Weight: 500 g
Language: English


MEDIA REVIEWS

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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“Not McCarthy, but not bad”

The jacket blurb compares this book to the writing of Cormac McCarthy, which is way short of the mark. Thematically, maybe, but stylistically, whilst there may be a nod or two, it's in no way comparable.

For all... More

Paperback edition
Helpful? Upvote 75

“Very depressing”

I had no idea what to expect from this book, but unfortunately I was not really pleasantly surprised.
This book is really really depressing. A couple in a crumbling marriage, their daughter stuck in a momentumless... More

Paperback edition
Helpful? Upvote 63

“Bleak and beautiful”

I have not read David Vann's first novel, Legend of a Suicide, so I came to Caribou Island with fresh eyes, you might say, and had no idea what to expect.

Caribou Island is set in the wilderness of Alaska and... More

Paperback edition
Helpful? Upvote 56

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