Gone to the Forest
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
'Dark, obsessive prose, punctuated by images of strange, surreal beauty. One thinks at times of both Coetzee and Gordimer, but Kitamura is very much her own writer' Salman Rushdie
'Kitamura is in complete control, both of the prose and of the story it carries. She is a skilled hunter and we are her helpless prey' Teju Cole
Set on a struggling farm in a fiercely beautiful colonial country teetering on the brink of civil war, this second novel by one of international literature's rising young stars weaves a brilliant tale of family drama and political turmoil.
Since his mother's death ten years earlier, Tom and his father have fashioned a strained peace on their family farm. Everything is frozen under the old man's vicious, relentless control - even, Tom soon discovers, his own future. When a young woman named Carine enters their lives, the complex triangle of intrigue and affection escalates the tension between the two men to breaking point. After a catastrophic volcanic eruption ignites the nation's smoldering discontent into open revolution, Tom, his father and Carine find themselves questioning their loyalties to one another and their determination to salvage their way of life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this wondrous tale of both a family and a country's dissolution, Kitamura brings readers into an unspecified time in an unnamed colonial country where the natives are restless and the white settlers are soon to be relieved of what they've taken. In this newly unstable environment, alive with an increasingly destructive undercurrent, we meet Tom, heir to his family's estate, whose inertia and na vet make him an equally pitiable and winning character, particularly in contrast to his charismatic, domineering father, whose steady decline is detailed in spellbinding horror. On the brink of the country's and the family's decimation, a woman named Carine enters the scene and vies for the attention of both men. She is a manipulative, waiflike woman with a questionable past, and her competing tendencies toward self-destruction and self-preservation make for a vibrant conflict. Finally, there are Jose and Celeste, two bafflingly loyal servants whose connection to Tom and his father is both shocking and fitting. In her second novel (after The Longshot), Kitamura, with spare, mesmerizing prose, paints a memorable vision of emotional chaos echoed by geologic and political turmoil.
