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A Novel
by Peter Rock
Abandoned on a remote island known as Makeshift, three sisters—Ari, Heiko, and CeCe—believe they're the last humans on Earth.
These three, left alone after a band of foreigners slaughtered their entire community, must learn to fend for themselves. They fish and forage in the shallow waters of their protected cove, salvage useful treasures from the rusting hulks of ships that ran aground on its offshore reefs, and entertain themselves with half-remembered tales from their time before.
But when they stray beyond the island into a wider, broken world, they find that life may not be as they believed. And upon their return to the island, they face further revelations that strain their bonds, hint that secrets may be everywhere, and affirm their need for one another in the face of a perilous future. Makeshift is a singular novel of hope and survival set on a small rock-bound island in the coastal Pacific Northwest, and a testament to devotion and allegiance rendered with the haunting grace of Rock's precision prose.
"In Peter Rock's haunting and eerie eleventh novel, young Ari narrates a story of finding and making family after everything has gone wrong. Or have things gone wrong? Rock's glorious evocation of the natural world yearns for a time before, or in this case, after modern civilization—here, wreck-diving cormorants and trees responding to the north-western breezes serve as a Greek chorus for a world slaked of human intervention. Lyrical and poignant, Makeshift proves a powerful antidote to the modern world by tracing its landscape's roots. This must-read novel lures the reader in, not unlike the coastal wrecks that line the island of Makeshift." —Adam Johnson, author of The Wayfinder
This information about Makeshift was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Peter Rock is the author of eleven previous works of fiction, including My Abandonment, which won the Alex Award and was adapted into the film Leave No Trace. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and John Dos Passos Prize, he lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two daughters.
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