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Description for The Cove
Hardback. Very good copy in good dustwrapper. First edition signed.
In their little cabin set in the shadow of a deep cove, Laurel Shelton and her brother Hank have built a home. The locals whisper about the cove being cursed and perhaps it is: good fortune rarely seems to wind its way down the long overgrown trail that leads to their clearing in the woods. One day the course of both their lives seems altered when Laurel happens upon a stranger hiding among the trees. With only a simple haversack of worldly belongings, the alluring and mysterious Walter is soon drawn in to life in the cove, helping Hank on the farm and bringing Laurel the only real comfort she has ever known. But as soon as the dark cloud hanging over the cove finally begins to lift, a secret is uncovered that threatens to shatter their newly found happiness. As their neighbours begin to stoke a fire of rage against the cove and its inhabitants, Laurel, Hank and Walter come to understand the terrible danger they are in . . . A breathtaking, lyrical novel with a profoundly moving love story at its heart, The Cove confirms Ron Rash as a masterful novelist at the height of his powers.
Product Details
Condition
Used, Very Good
Publisher
Canongate Books
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2012
Number of Pages
272
Place of Publication
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
ISBN
9780857862617
SKU
KEX0303054
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
Ref
99-1
About Ron Rash
Ron Rash is an award-winning poet, short-story writer and novelist. His most recent story collection, Burning Bright, won the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and his previous novel, Serena, was a New York Times Bestseller. Both are available from Canongate. He lives in the Appalachian Mountains, USA.
Reviews for The Cove
The Cove is a novel that speaks intimately to today's politics. Beautifully written, tough, raw, uncompromising, entirely new. Ron Rash is a writer's writer who writes for others
Colum McCann Ron Rash is a writer of botht he darkly beautiful and the sadly true; The Cove solidifies his reputation as one of our very finest novelists
Richard Russo, author of EMPIRE FALLS When writers gather and tipple while discussing those not present at the table but admired, the name Ron Rash quickly comes up. He uses language with such apparently effortless skill that it is as though he found words in his barn as a child and has been training them to fit his needs ever since. There's not much he doesn't know about humans in turmoil, or his region, a place where nothing ever changes until all of a sudden it does and often too much. Rash throws a big shadow now and it's only going to get bigger
Daniel Woodrell, author of WINTER'S BONE The Cove is a marvelous novel, bristling with power, humanity and the exceptional quality of characterization and story-telling we have come to expect from Ron Rash
Irvine Welsh Remarkable . . . Mr. Rash certainly knows how to rivet attention
New York Times on Burning Bright
Finds a narrow sweet spot between Raymond Carver and William Faulkner
Washington Post on Burning Bright
This book calls to mind Snow Falling on Cedars and Cold Mountain, but the poet in Ron Rash and his lyrical prose elevate this novel to its "Book of the Year" status
Irish Times on Serena
Serena could sit comfortably on any bookshelf alongside Cormac McCarthy or Charles Frazier . . . it's a spectacular book
Guardian
Beautifully written, seriously moving
Kate Saunders
The Times
[Ron Rash] appears to derive quiet, almost religious, pleasure in descriptive clarity, so that sentences become little paradigms of the events they describe . . . because of its simplicity, the hard won elegance of its telling, it stays singularly in the mind after it has finished
Tim Adams
The Observer
The narrative engrossingly beguiles slyly building to a dénouement that whilst signalled early on is still shocking when it happens
Carol Treaure
We Love This Book
The greatest pleasure in it for me was the clear, rather mannered cadence of the prose and the author's fine ear for the speech rhythms of the rural South
Ursula K Le Guin
The Guardian
Rash is a brilliant miniaturist. In describing the Appalachian landscape he can enthral the reader for pages just by telling them of the patterns of rust on a fencepost or of shards of broken glass dangling from a tree. Similarly, his portrayal of the region's inhabitants is supremely deft
George Pendie
Financial Times
A novel which contrives to be both tender, in the depiction of the developing love between Laurel and Walter, and sharply, menacingly dramatic. The sense of place is vividly realised, and the passages of description are never mere decoration, but create the mood in which action unfolds with what seems a painful necessity
Allan Massie
The Scotsman
While Rash sucks the reader in with the plot, it is the beautiful precision of his line-by-line prose that is the real joy ofThe Cove. The descriptions of Laurel and Hank's existence are mesmerising and poetic, never cluttered or overwritten. It is a hard life and that is reflected in the language, but there is elemental beauty to be found even in the darkest recesses of the world and the mind, and Rash finds it in spades
Doug Johnstone
Independent on Sunday
The language is ideally pitched to the narrative...it is a nuanced American tragedy, vividly and traditionally executed with deceptive grace. Rash draws on the darkest elements of the fairy tale and the devices of light and shadow, romance and vengeance, while refraining from the stock sexualisation introduced by many contemporary writers...The closing comments, uttered by a devastated old friend, achieve a Shakespearean resonance. This very fine, dignified, almost stately novel speaks from another time and does so with rare conviction
Irish Times
Colum McCann Ron Rash is a writer of botht he darkly beautiful and the sadly true; The Cove solidifies his reputation as one of our very finest novelists
Richard Russo, author of EMPIRE FALLS When writers gather and tipple while discussing those not present at the table but admired, the name Ron Rash quickly comes up. He uses language with such apparently effortless skill that it is as though he found words in his barn as a child and has been training them to fit his needs ever since. There's not much he doesn't know about humans in turmoil, or his region, a place where nothing ever changes until all of a sudden it does and often too much. Rash throws a big shadow now and it's only going to get bigger
Daniel Woodrell, author of WINTER'S BONE The Cove is a marvelous novel, bristling with power, humanity and the exceptional quality of characterization and story-telling we have come to expect from Ron Rash
Irvine Welsh Remarkable . . . Mr. Rash certainly knows how to rivet attention
New York Times on Burning Bright
Finds a narrow sweet spot between Raymond Carver and William Faulkner
Washington Post on Burning Bright
This book calls to mind Snow Falling on Cedars and Cold Mountain, but the poet in Ron Rash and his lyrical prose elevate this novel to its "Book of the Year" status
Irish Times on Serena
Serena could sit comfortably on any bookshelf alongside Cormac McCarthy or Charles Frazier . . . it's a spectacular book
Guardian
Beautifully written, seriously moving
Kate Saunders
The Times
[Ron Rash] appears to derive quiet, almost religious, pleasure in descriptive clarity, so that sentences become little paradigms of the events they describe . . . because of its simplicity, the hard won elegance of its telling, it stays singularly in the mind after it has finished
Tim Adams
The Observer
The narrative engrossingly beguiles slyly building to a dénouement that whilst signalled early on is still shocking when it happens
Carol Treaure
We Love This Book
The greatest pleasure in it for me was the clear, rather mannered cadence of the prose and the author's fine ear for the speech rhythms of the rural South
Ursula K Le Guin
The Guardian
Rash is a brilliant miniaturist. In describing the Appalachian landscape he can enthral the reader for pages just by telling them of the patterns of rust on a fencepost or of shards of broken glass dangling from a tree. Similarly, his portrayal of the region's inhabitants is supremely deft
George Pendie
Financial Times
A novel which contrives to be both tender, in the depiction of the developing love between Laurel and Walter, and sharply, menacingly dramatic. The sense of place is vividly realised, and the passages of description are never mere decoration, but create the mood in which action unfolds with what seems a painful necessity
Allan Massie
The Scotsman
While Rash sucks the reader in with the plot, it is the beautiful precision of his line-by-line prose that is the real joy ofThe Cove. The descriptions of Laurel and Hank's existence are mesmerising and poetic, never cluttered or overwritten. It is a hard life and that is reflected in the language, but there is elemental beauty to be found even in the darkest recesses of the world and the mind, and Rash finds it in spades
Doug Johnstone
Independent on Sunday
The language is ideally pitched to the narrative...it is a nuanced American tragedy, vividly and traditionally executed with deceptive grace. Rash draws on the darkest elements of the fairy tale and the devices of light and shadow, romance and vengeance, while refraining from the stock sexualisation introduced by many contemporary writers...The closing comments, uttered by a devastated old friend, achieve a Shakespearean resonance. This very fine, dignified, almost stately novel speaks from another time and does so with rare conviction
Irish Times