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Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

THE UNDERWORLD

Kevin Canty

For readers of Russell Banks and Richard Ford, a novel about loss, love, and redemption following a catastrophe in a small mining town.

In THE UNDERWORLD, Kevin Canty tells a story that begins with a disastrous fire, based on a true incident, in an isolated silver mining town in Idaho in the 1970s. Everyone in town had a friend, a lover, a brother, a husband killed in the mine. The Underworld traces the lives of the handful of survivors and their loved ones—a young widow with twin children, a college student trying to make a life for himself in another town, a lifelong hard-rock miner—as they struggle to come to terms with the loss. It's a tough, hard-working, hard-drinking town, a town of whores and priests and bar fights, but nobody's tough enough to get through this undamaged. And then, without warning, people start to heal. A powerful and unforgettable tale about small town lives and the healing power of love.

Kevin Canty's short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Story, Tin House and Glimmer Train. He is the author of four previous novels, INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN (1996), NINE BELOW ZERO (1999), WINSLOW IN LOVE (2005), and EVERYTHING (2010).
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Book

Published 2017-03-01 by W.W. Norton

Comments

Canty has a keen eye for details in this setting and suitably dry, spare prose. (...) Canty does a fine job of showing how disaster can lacerate a place or people without utterly destroying hope. (starred review)