Continental Drift (58 page)

Well—to Amherst, and K. Thank heaven we can see each other even this infrequently. I love loving her.

Reprinted by permission of Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin

THE DARLING

The Darling
is Hannah Musgrave’s story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he’s immediately placed in prison. Hannah’s encounter with Taylor in America ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah’s family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.

Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991,
The Darling
is a political/historical thriller—reminiscent of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad—that explodes the genre, raising serious philosophical questions about terrorism, political violence, and the clash of races and cultures.

“In
The Darling
, [Banks] is working at full strength, and his readers are in his debt.”

—Washington Post Book World

THE ANGEL ON THE ROOF: THE STORIES OF RUSSELL BANKS

With
The Angel on the Roof,
Russell Banks offers readers an astonishing collection of thirty years of his short fiction, revised especially for this volume and highlighted by the inclusion of nine new stories that are among the finest he has ever written. As is characteristic of all of Banks’s works, these stories resonate with irony and compassion, honesty and insight, extending into the vast territory of the heart and the world, from working-class New England to Florida and the Caribbean and Africa. Broad in scope and rich in imagination,
The Angel on the Roof
affirms Russell Banks’s place as one of the masters of American storytelling.

“A beautifully lucid, frequently wrenching collection…. What elevates these stories far above their tacitly heartbreaking events are the vast reserves of compassion and wisdom that Mr. Banks brings to framing tragedy.”

—Janet Maslin,
New York Times

CLOUDSPLITTER

Cloudsplitter
is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America’s most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented,
Cloudsplitter
is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it was like to be alive in that time.

“A huge and thunderously good book.”

—Chicago Tribune

RULE OF THE BONE

When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a cross-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name “Bone”.

He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves, and then hides in the boarded-up summer house of a professor and his wife. He finally settles in an abandoned school bus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile. There Bone meets I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian, and together they begin a second adventure that takes the reader from Middle America to the ganja-growing mountains of Jamaica. It is an amazing journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal, and redemption.

“[O]ne finishes the book with indelible sympathy for tough-guy Bone, touched by his loneliness, fear and desperation, and having absorbed Banks’s message: that (as he said recently) society’s failure to save its children is ‘the main unrecognized tragedy of our time.’

—Publishers Weekly

THE SWEET HEREAFTER

When fourteen children from the small town of Sam Dent are lost in a tragic accident, its citizens are confronted with one of life’s most difficult and disturbing questions: When the worst happens, whom do you blame, and how do you cope? Masterfully written,
The Sweet Hereafter
is a large-hearted novel that brings to life a cast of unforgettable small-town characters and illuminates the mysteries and realities of love as well as grief.

“The characters are rendered with such clear-eyed affection, the central tragedy handled with such unsentimental artistry, the wonderfully named mountain hamlet of Sam Dent described in such precise (and often funny) detail,
The Sweet Hereafter
is not only Banks’s most accomplished book to date, but his most accessible and ultimately affirmative. Russell Banks knows everything worth knowing … and much, much more.”

—
Washington Post Book World

AFFLICTION

Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. It is a mark of Russell Banks’s artistry and understanding that Wade comes to loom in one’s mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition. Told by his articulate, equally scarred younger brother, Wade’s story becomes as spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to the dynamite.

“Magnificently convincing … beautifully sustained, suspenseful.”

—New York Times Book Review

HAMILTON STARK

Hamilton Stark is a New Hampshire pipe fitter and the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother. He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a handsome man: funny, passionately honest, and a good dancer. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides to write about Stark as a hero whose anger and solitude represent passion and wisdom. At the same time that he tells Hamilton Stark’s story, he describes the process of writing the novel and the complicated connections between truth and fiction. As Stark slips in and out of focus, maddeningly elusive and fascinatingly complex, this beguiling novel becomes at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.