It was so many things at once. A gripping noir thriller, while also being a meditation on race, history, religion and what America is, with a central character who is so self-effacing that at first you don't notice that he _is_ the central character, but whom you grow to love. Make sure you read to the end of the acknowledgements.
A thrilling tale of murder and mystery in a city where history has run a little differently -- from the best-selling author of Golden Hill.
'Utterly immersive.' Spectator 'Thrilling.' Financial Times 'Unlike anything else you will read this year.' Daily Express 'A classic of alternative history.' Observer 'A delight.' Sunday Telegraph
It's 1922 and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. In the ancient city of Cahokia - a teeming industrial metropolis, a tinderbox of every race and creed - peace holds. Just about.
Such an evocative sense of place; constructed ever so carefully, but with a light touch. I love the way he tells the story of one place and its many people across centuries, layering the ghosts over one another.
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.
“With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Because of Demon. _Such_ a compelling voice and character. You are with him every step, in awe of his resilience, aching for his vulnerability, desperate for him at last to see the ocean.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
The history of atheism and unbelief isn't a history of rational ideas winning an argument - not because atheism isn't rational, but because human beings don't work that way. We embrace belief, or abandon it, with our whole selves: intuitively, emotionally. This book gives a new history of unbelief, explaining not its intellectual triumph but its emotional power, and how anger and anxiety generated doubt in (formerly) Christian Europe from the Middle Ages to the present.
