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  • Published: 3 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9780670918447
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $19.99

Caribou Island




A great American novel from the new Cormac McCarthy

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.

  • Published: 3 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9780670918447
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $19.99

About the author

David Vann

David Vann was born in the Aleutian Islands and spent his childhood in Ketchikan, Alaska. He is the author of the international bestseller Legend of a Suicide – which has been translated into eighteen languages and won several prizes including the Prix Medicis Etranger – Caribou Island, Dirt, Goat Mountain and Aquarium. He is also the author of two bestselling non-fiction books, and has written for Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, the Sunday Times, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and other magazines and newspapers.

Also by David Vann

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Praise for Caribou Island

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