Clearing - Tapa blanda

Near-perfect untouchably good Alan Warner, Daily Telegraph Back: When Byron Aldridge, irrevocably traumatised from fighting in the Great War, flees his comfortable Pennsylvania life for a remote Louisiana sawmill, his brother Randolph immediately follows. But here, surrounded by cypress swamps and alligators, men lead lives of backbreaking toil relieved only by the whiskey, card games and girls offered by the local mafia. As the brothers struggle to understand each other and their wives contend with their own hopes and disappointments, the future begins to grow fearsome for them all. An extraordinary novel, one of the best I've read in years Annie Proulx, Guardian The relationship between the two brothers is sensitively and brilliantly drawn; the strength of the women in the book, which is at odds with the harsh physicality of a land governed by violence, is deftly depicted The Clearing carries an emotional charge far beyond its pages and does what all great fiction does: gives insights allowing us to understand human nature and a distant time and place. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Peter Straus, Literary Review This is a novel so firmly located and vividly realised that you can almost smell the Louisiana swampwater as you read a gripping, action-packed tale, but also a notably intelligent one, its powerful narrative drive counterbalanced an

Born and raised in Louisiana, Tim Gautreaux has taught fiction for many years and lives with his family in Hammond. His work has appeared in Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and Best American Short Stories. His first novel, The Next Step in the Dance (to be published by Sceptre in Nov 04) won the 1999 SEBA Book Award, and he has also published two collections of short fiction.