Grand Isle: A Novel (Excelsior Editions) - Softcover

Van Arsdale, Sarah

3.55

11 ratings by Goodreads

9781438442402: Grand Isle: A Novel (Excelsior Editions)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1438442408 ISBN 13: 9781438442402

Publisher: State University Press of New York, 2012

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Review:

"Van Arsdale is a masterful writer. She created characters with wonderful depth. They will stay with the reader long after the final chapter is read." -- San Francisco Book Review

..".absorbing and suspenseful ... [Van Arsdale's] depiction of place is often lyrical and dead-on." -- East Hampton Star

"With fine prose and keen attention to emotional detail, Sarah Van Arsdale gives us a real community of friends and neighbors in a summer colony on Long Island Sound. A brutal accident disrupts this Eden, revealing tangles of grief, guilt, and love in these deeply connected lives. Death here is as final and confusing as it is in reality. Van Arsdale makes us care about her large cast of island people: male and female; young and old; middle class and working class; good and half-good. This is a smart, rich, grown-up novel that can be compared to the best work of Richard Russo and Ann Beattie." -- Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters: A Novel

"This is not just a lyrical novel of loss and renewal, but a truly gripping read. The complicated characters of Grand Isle hurtle toward their fates in a way that is somehow both inevitable and completely unexpected. Van Arsdale brings a naturalist's trained eye to her vivid descriptions, and the line she draws between the human and natural worlds is as shifting and elusive as the line between water and land in the tidal marshes that surround this island community." -- Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

About the Author:

Sarah Van Arsdale is the author of Toward Amnesia and Blue, which won the 2002 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel. Her articles, fiction, and poetry have appeared in many publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Columbia Review, and Lilith magazine. She has taught at numerous colleges and universities, most recently at New York University and the City University of New York. She lives in New York City.

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