Shadow Country - Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen's great American epic - Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone - was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvellously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbours who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favourite son. Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and colour, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson's wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."

ISBN: 9780857050007

Pages: 892

Trade paperback

McLehose Press, 2008

Good condition; jacket slightly creased; book clean inside

B38