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From the award-winning author of the national bestseller Idaho comes a stunning collection of stories that explore how unexpected intuitions forever alter the lives of ordinary people.
Five years after moving into the isolated house in rural Oregon where her husband lived as a child, the protagonist of "Victor's Room" begins to doubt her husband's account of his family's past. In "Round Lake," a young woman's plans to meet a lover in Tokyo are upended when she learns a startling truth about her mother's death. In "Owl," winner of an O. Henry Award, a fur trapper reckons with the dreadful origins of his marriage after his wife is brutally injured by four adolescent boys.
Haunting and psychologically provocative, and set against the vivid backdrop of the Pacific Northwest, Nightjar illuminates the secret, instinctive knowledge that lies just under the surface of our awareness.
"Ruskovich blends urgent pacing with lush wooded scenery and intimate psychological details. It's a marvel." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In this exquisitely tailored collection of five stories, Ruskovich plumbs the depths of mystery, memory, and the quiet grief of intimacy...Like Idaho, this book has a compelling slipperiness, both in time and reality. Ruskovich's characters are often in two places in time at once, and she expertly weaves memory and observation to fuse the past and present together...A portal to a haunting, liminal Pacific Northwest." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"These are marvelous and unsettling stories. Ruskovich's prose is lambent, the relationships between her characters are thorny, complex, and mesmerizing, and the shapes of her stories constantly surprise. I loved Nightjar." —Kelly Link, bestselling author of The Book of Love
"These are exquisite short stories. They disturb, delight, and linger long after finishing." —Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses
This information about Nightjar 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.
Photo: Sam McPhee
Emily Ruskovich is the author of the bestselling novel Idaho, which won the International Dublin Literary Award, only the fourth American novel ever to do so. Ruskovich is also the recipient of the Pacific Northwest Book Award and an O. Henry Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Guardian, One Story, Zoetrope, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She grew up in the Idaho panhandle, and lives now in the mountains of western Montana with her husband and their three young children. Nightjar is her second book.
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