Outer Banks (49 page)

“BANKS IS A WRITER WHO HAS A MIND.”

—CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“HE WRITES A FINE, CLEAR PROSE—SOME OF THE BEST, IN FACT, NOW BEING WRITTEN BY ANYONE.”

—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

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More by Russell Banks

THE RESERVE

Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness—and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules.

Twenty-nine-year-old Vanessa Cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress, the adopted only child of a highly regarded New York brain surgeon and his socialite wife. Twice married already, Vanessa has been scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men. But on the night of July 4, 1936, at her parents' country home in a remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as the Reserve, two events coincide to permanently alter the course of Vanessa's callow life: her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, and a mysteriously seductive local artist, Jordan Groves, blithely lands his Waco biplane in the pristine waters of the forbidden Upper Lake…

Jordan's reputation has preceded him; he is internationally known as much for his exploits and conquests as for his paintings themselves, and, here in the midst of the Great Depression, his leftist political loyalties seem suspiciously undercut by his wealth and elite clientele. But for all his worldly swagger, Jordon is as staggered by Vanessa's beauty and charm as she is by his defiant independence. He falls easy prey to her electrifying personality, but it is not long before he discovers that the heiress carries a dark, deeply scarring family secret. Emotionally unstable from the start, and further unhinged by her father's unexpected death, Vanessa begins to spin wildly out of control, manipulating and destroying the lives of all who cross her path.

Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondack wilderness to the skies above wartorn Spain and fascist Germany,
The Reserve
is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author's extraordinary repertoire.

“A vividly imagined book. It has the romantic atmosphere of those great thirties tales in film and prose, and it speeds the reader along from its first pages… Banks's talents are so large—and the novel so fundamentally engaging…
The Reserve
is a pleasure well worth savoring.”

—Scott Turow,
Publishers Weekly

“Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks.”

—
New York Times Book Review

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

A powerful literary classic,
Continental Drift
is a major novel about uprootedness, migration, and exploitation in contemporary America. Russell Banks has brought together two of the dominant realms of his fiction—New England and the Caribbean—by skillfully braiding into one taut narrative the story of a young bluecollar worker and family man who abandons his broken dreams in New Hampshire and the story of a young Haitian woman who with her nephew and baby flees the brutal injustice and poverty of her homeland.

Hailed by James Atlas in
Atlantic Monthly
as “the most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America … a great American novel,” Banks's 1985 novel is one of the most celebrated works of fiction of the last twentyfive years.

“A vigorous and original novel.”

—
New York Review of Books

“An excellent novel… An important novel because of the precise manner in which it reflects the spiritual yearning and materialistic frenzy of our contemporary life. It is also an extremely skillful book, both in its writing, which is impeccable, and in the way it unfolds… Always, Banks writes with tremendous knowledge, convictions, and authenticity.”

—
Chicago Tribune

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 punkedout 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 selfdiscovery 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.