“Vann’s prose is as pure as a gulp of water from an Alaskan stream.”—Financial Times
David Vann’s dazzling debut Legend of a Suicide was reviewed in over a 150 major global publications, won 11 prizes worldwide, was on 40 “best books of the year” lists, and established its author as a literary master. Since then, Vann has delivered an exceptional body of work, receiving, among others, best foreign novel in France and Spain (France’s Prix Medicis Etranger, Spain’s Premi Llibreter), a California Book Award, and the mid-career St. Francis College Literary Prize. Aquarium, his implosive new book and first to be published by Grove, will take Vann to a wider audience than ever before.
Twelve year old Caitlin lives alone with her mother—a docker at the local container port—in subsidized housing next to an airport in Seattle. Each day, while she waits to be picked up after school, Caitlin visits the local aquarium to study the fish. Gazing at the creatures within the watery depths, Caitlin accesses a shimmering universe beyond her own. When she befriends an old man at the tanks one day, who seems as enamored of the fish as she, Caitlin cracks open a dark family secret and propels her once-blissful relationship with her mother toward a precipice of terrifying consequence.
In crystalline, chiseled yet graceful prose, Aquarium takes us into the heart of a brave young girl whose longing for love and capacity for forgiveness transforms the damaged people around her. Relentless and heartbreaking, primal and redemptive, Aquarium is a transporting story from one of the best American writers of our time.
An Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2015: The award-winning David Vann has written an elegant and fierce novel about love, betrayal, the limits of forgiveness, and “unconscious child-joy that [can] explode like the sun.” Every day after school, Caitlin walks to the Seattle Aquarium where she finds refuge in the fish and waits for her single mother to finish her job and take her home. At the aquarium, an old man who loves fish as much as Caitlin, befriends her, cracking open a family secret that will change her life forever. She begins to fight with her mother, all-out confrontations that are raw, rapt and unforgettable; falls into deep young love with another twelve year old; and the joyful dream of having a bigger family threatens all that she’s known. Aquarium is beautifully and patiently written, and will make you ache with remembrance and empathy. – Al Woodworth
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Aquarium
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