Dirt

Twenty-two-year-old Galen is a New Age believer on a warpath towards transcendence. He lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded house, surviving on old family money that his Aunt Helen and cousin Jennifer are determined to get their hands on.

Vann’s gift – his quest, almost – is a willingness to explore the unimaginable, the unthinkable, on the page . He is the real thing – a mature, risk-taking and fantastically adept fiction writer who dares go to the darkest places, explore their most appalling corners. I haven’t read a novel as rough and shocking or, importantly, as wise and warm as this one in a long time.

Vann’s rendering of the everyday gratings of family life is pitch-perfect ... A well-written, unflinching exploration of the often terrifying chasm between who we want to be, and who we actually are.

Vann is a brave writer, daring to write about and depict things that most other authors would baulk at , but that’s what makes him so good – that unflinching eye for the darkness you could potentially find in any of us, given the wrong chain of events ... If you want the naked, awful truth, then dive in.

This is a novel of violence, destruction and ruin. There is no salvation. And yet Mr Vann’s soaring writing carries it forward – a reminder of the beauty that can grace even the beastliest things .

Unputdownable, thundering at breathtaking speed towards the shocking climactic act. Brilliantly chilling .

The characters in Dirt read as archetypes, figures in a Beckett play …The last pages of Dirt are lit by a berserk energy. It’s as if Vann has pulled off the trick of putting us inside a Hitchcock maniac … When you finally put this book down, break the spell and walk away, you’re left with a deeper resonance, a lingering sadness.

Uncompromisingly direct.

Another dispatch from dysfunctional suburbia by one of the US’s hottest writers…A morbid fascination with the family’s eye-poppingly vicious interactions keeps you turning the pages…It’s hard to forget.

David Vann has a talent for being able to pack a lot into very few words - and to make them all effective and forceful. ...compelling. If I start reading Vann I know that I'm going to have to keep reading no matter how painful, how distressing the story...what marks this book out as being something special is the forensic examination of the tipping point at which a disturbed mind, an unfocused mind tumbles into madness.

A powerful story of a family on the verge of imploding, David Vann's novel might not be an easy read - but it is, undoubtedly, a book you will want to devour in a single sitting.

David Vann was born in the Aleutian Islands and spent his childhood in Ketchikan, Alaska. His first book of fiction, the international bestseller Legend of a Suicide , has now been translated into seventeen languages and has won several prizes, including the Prix Medicis Etranger in France. His novel Caribou Island is an international bestseller. 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. A current Guggenheim fellow and former Wallace Stegner fellow, he is currently a professor at the University of San Francisco.