Tom Drury – författare

In his follow up to The End of Vandalism, Drury depicts a quiet, Midwestern October weekend in the lives of the Darling family, whose members all want something without knowing how to get it: for Charles, an heirloom shotgun; for his wife, Joan, the imaginative life she once knew; for their young son, Micah, a knowledge of the scope of his world, aided by prowling the empty town at night; and for Joan''s daughter, Lyris, a stable home where she can begin to grow up. Sometimes together, other times crucially apart, the Darlings move through a series of vivid encounters that demonstrate how even the most provisional family can endure in its own particular way.

Ten years ago, Tom Drury''s groundbreaking debut, The End of Vandalism, was serialized in the New Yorker, was compared to the work of Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner by USA Today, and was named a Best Book of the Year in multiple publications.

Welcome to Grouse County—a fictional Midwest that is at once familiar and amusingly eccentric—where a thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice, a lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse, and a sleepless man watches his restless bride scatter their bills beneath the stars. At the heart of The End of Vandalism is an unforgettable love triangle set off by a crime: Sheriff Dan Norman arrests Tiny Darling for vandalizing an antivandalism dance and then marries the culprit''s ex-wife Louise. So Tiny loses Louise, Louise loses her sense of self, and the three find themselves on an epic journey. At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, The End of Vandalism is a radiant novel about the beauty and ache of modern life.

Set in the rugged region of the Midwest that gives the novel its title, The Driftless Area is the story of Pierre Hunter, a young bartender with unfailing optimism, a fondness for coin tricks, and an uncanny capacity for finding trouble. When he falls in love with the mysterious and isolated Stella Rosmarin, Pierre becomes the central player in a revenge drama he must unravel and bring to its shocking conclusion. Along the way he will liberate seventy-seven thousand dollars from a murderous thief, summon the resources that have eluded him all his life, and come to question the very meaning of chance and mortality.

Nothing is as it seems in The Driftless Area—identities shift, violent secrets lie in wait, the future can cause the past, and love becomes a mission that can take you beyond this world. In its tender, cool irony, The Driftless Area recalls the best of neo-noir, and its cast of bona fide small­-town eccentrics adrift in the American Midwest make for a clever and deeply pleasurable read from one of our most beloved authors.