Shadow Tag - Softcover

Erdrich, Louise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061946109 ISBN 13: 9780061946103

Publisher: Harper Large Print, 2010

Synopsis

"Erdrich is a true original... [and] one of our major writers." --Washington Post Book World

Shadow Tag, the brilliant new novel by Louise Erdrich, is a stunning tour-de-force from the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author of Love Medicine and Pulitzer-Prize-finalist The Plague of Doves. In the vein of the novels of such contemporaries as Zoe Heller and Susan Minot, Shadow Tag is an intense and heart-wrenching story of a troubled marriage and a family in disarray--and a radical departure from Erdrich's previous acclaimed work.

About this title

Review:

"An exquisite, character-driven tale...its piercing insights into sex, family, and power are breathtaking...A masterfully concentrated and gripping novel of image and conquest, autonomy and love, inheritance and loss."--Donna Seaman, Booklist

"A brilliant cautionary tale...Reading it is like watching a wildfire whose flames are so mesmerizingly beautiful that it's almost easy to ignore the deadly mess left behind."--Library Journal

Clear, urgent, deep as a swift river...accomplishes the literary miracle of making a reader ravenous to finish it, while stinging with regret at how soon it must end."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Muscular and fearless...It is [Erdrich's] superb telling of this story that makes it real, her stellar writing that brings powerful truth to invented worlds."--BookPage

"SHADOW TAG is hard to put down...It builds to a spectacular ending with a twist I didn't see coming...Erdrich has taken a tragedy and turned it into art."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"SHADOW TAG is compelling...a searing, personal examination of one family that's falling apart."--Miami Herald

"A portrait of an 'iconic' marriage on its way to dissolution...Erdrich's unbridled urgency yields startlingly original phrasing as well as flashes of blinding lucidity."--New York Times Book Review

" A fierce novel...raw...alive...vividly present...it marks a breakthrough for the author."--Columbus Dispatch

"A fast-paced novel of exceptional artistic, intellectual, and psychological merit...Nowhere have love's complications been better illustrated than in the raw honesty of Shadow Tag."--Boston Sunday Globe

"A masterpiece...a captivating work of fiction...exquisite...tightly focused...arresting...This profoundly tragic novel captures that lament in some of Erdrich's most beautiful and urgent writing."--Ron Charles, Washington Post

From the Back Cover:

"Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me.

Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could."

When Irene America discovers that her husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe-deposit box. There she records the truth about her life and her marriage, while turning her Red Diary--hidden where Gil will find it--into a manipulative farce. Alternating between these two records, complemented by unflinching third-person narration, Shadow Tag is an eerily gripping read.

When the novel opens, Irene is resuming work on her doctoral thesis about George Catlin, the nineteenth-century painter whose Native American subjects often regarded his portraits with suspicious wonder. Gil, who gained notoriety as an artist through his emotionally revealing portraits of his wife--work that is adoring, sensual, and humiliating, even shocking--realizes that his fear of losing Irene may force him to create the defining work of his career.

Meanwhile, Irene and Gil fight to keep up appearances for their three children: fourteen-year-old genius Florian, who escapes his family's unraveling with joints and a stolen bottle of wine; Riel, their only daughter, an eleven-year-old feverishly planning to preserve her family, no matter what disaster strikes; and sweet kindergartener Stoney, who was born, his parents come to realize, at the beginning of the end.

As her home increasingly becomes a place of violence and secrets, and she drifts into alcoholism, Irene moves to end her marriage. But her attachment to Gil is filled with shadowy need and delicious ironies. In brilliantly controlled prose, Shadow Tag fearlessly explores the complex nature of love, the fluid boundaries of identity, and one family's struggle for survival and redemption.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Large Print
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0061946109
• ISBN 13: 9780061946103
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272