Bright Air Black

David Vann was born in the Aleutian Islands and spent his childhood in Ketchikan, Alaska. He is the author of the international bestseller Legend of a Suicide – which has been translated into eighteen languages and won several prizes including the Prix Medicis Etranger – Caribou Island, Dirt, Goat Mountain and Aquarium. He is also the author of two bestselling non-fiction books, and has written for Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, the Sunday Times, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and other magazines and newspapers.

This Medea is intelligent and cynical, slighted by a husband and her gender. She is a woman who craves revenge for the fate of being born a woman and thus rendered powerless in a world ruled by men. Magnificently gruesome ... Short poetic phrases pile up, fall away, stop short. Powerful internal rhythms build and subside, like the waves the Argonauts sail over ... A searing family drama set against a backdrop of untamed nature … At the heart of this ambitious, dazzling, disturbing and memorable novel lies the uneasy juxtaposing of the wild and the civilised, and the complex, shifting relationship between the two.