Wink has a precise, clear prose style...The landscape is a character in itself - well-known, but changeable... Wink skilfully imbues his writing with a subtle sense of foreboding that never leaves... In this tightly controlled yet highly unpredictable novel we discover what it is like to come of age in a part of America that is always changing, always the ... Read moresame
Guardian
Callan Wink [...] reconfigures the landscape of the American West
Irish Times
Spun from the raw earth of the American heartland, August is a bruised and elegant poem to belonging. Wink's precise prose, tender and savage, make him a master of broken things
Karl Geary August is the rural coming of age that so many of us experience but so rarely see in print. Callan Wink has a voice like Annie Proulx's; he lands every detail with concrete authenticity and every emotional moment with tangible feeling
Rae DelBianco, author of
Rough Animal
The unsentimental education of a farm boy from Michigan, August wastes no words. It reads like early Hemingway, retooled for the present. Work, pain, weather, violence, the bitten-off curse of American masculinity-you'll find yourself praying for the redemption of its laconic, damaged, wonderful, still very young hero
William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Barbarian Days
August is an exceptional coming of age story.Callan Wink is too wise and empathetic a writer to ever allow his readers easy judgments as we follow his memorable young protagonist on his precarious way through adolescence. An outstanding debut novel and worthy follow up to Wink's widely praised collection of stories
Ron Rash, author of
The Risen
Callan Wink's characters are as real and vivid as if they'd stepped into your living room, uninvited, to tell their stories. His style is as clear, precise, and starkly poetic as the young Hemingway's, but with an more droll sense of humor. This book is simply super-a deft, beautiful, deeply engaging read
Brad Watson, author of
Miss Jane
While Wink gives his characters room to breathe, this stealthily engrossing novel never feels pressure-less, with a steady crackle of tension as August steers his perplexed path through a crossfire of expectations regarding what it means to be a man... quietly brilliant
Daily Mail
Beautifully understated
Books of the Year
Daily Mail
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