Crow Lake: FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED AUTHOR OF A TOWN CALLED SOLACE

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Luke rises to the tragedy and fights to keep what remains of their family together. He fights more literally to preserve the family ideal of higher education, punching Matt to keep him from quitting school. But Matt's entanglements with the neighbouring farm family, brutalised and violent, bring further tragedy for Kate.

Crow Lake - Quill and Quire Crow Lake - Quill and Quire

As the girls age, the author's terse, factual style takes on greater strength, the facts get better. Maddy's acquiescence in the friendship feels like an unstated, unsolved mystery, but the upshot of the girls' unequal dependence is more moving than one could anticipate. Truth can be stranger than fiction: this month brings four good first novels (already strange), each about the intertwinings of two or more families. One of them is a work of art.Kate found an escape from the legacy of their dark past in her passion for the natural world. Now a zoologist far away from the small farming community where she grew up, she thinks she's outgrown her three brothers, who were once her entire world. The dilemma is echoed or reinforced by a muted tension between the scientific bent of the Vereys and the 'arty' predilections of the Menges family, the fractured, extended clan at the heart of the book; and by the 'subtle fight of the female with the male... of female blithe confidence against male doubt'.

CROW LAKE | Kirkus Reviews

I don't know. Eat a lot, probably. Probably they need to recover their strength after producing all those eggs." The Morrison siblings have been haunted by tragedy since the sudden death of their parents in an accident when they were young. Intensity of feeling is not beyond her at all, but merely deeply repressed, a survival mechanism for coping with massive grief (but also a living out of the Morrison family edict: "Thou Shalt Not Emote"). This repression and its steep, life-sapping cost is familiar to so many of us who grew up with families where tightlipped reserve was the norm. She also has a glamorous best friend who has a sexy boyfriend who, it turns out, through an ingeniously arranged sequence of inadvertently divulged information and a recovered earring, Clare once slept with and forgot. The man did not forget.After the death of her alcoholic and neglectful mother, Chrysalis (sorry - I didn't choose the name) doesn't eat and barely comes out from under her bed in the derelict California mansion she and her brother grew up in and have inherited, even when her adored brother Eddie comes home. He brings with him an equally attractive fellow of like age (thirtyish), Ralph, with whom Chrysalis instantly falls in love.