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, ... Read moreauthor 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

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