Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2014
176 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
After years alone in a cell, an aging prisoner is released without explanation, expelled into a great city now utterly unfamiliar to him. Broken by years of brutality at the hands of the prison guards, he scrounges for scraps, sleeping wild, until a museum curator rescues him from an assault. The museum has just opened its most controversial exhibit: a perfect replica of the marshes, an expansive wilderness still wracked by conflict. There the man had spent years as a doctor among the hated and feared marshmen, who have been colonized but never conquered.
Then Marshlands reveals one of its many surprises: it is written in reverse. The novel leaps backward once, twice, returning to the marshes and unraveling time to reveal the doctor's ambiguous relationship to the austerely beautiful land and its people. As the pieces of his past come together, a great crime and its consequences begin to take shape. The true nature of the crime and who committed it will be saved for the breathtaking ending - or, rather, for the beginning.
In the tradition of Wilfred Thesiger's The Marsh Arabs and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, Marshlands explores a culture virtually snuffed out under Saddam Hussein, and how we cement our identities by pointing at someone to call "other." Elegant, brief, and searing, Matthew Olshan's Marshlands shivers with the life of a fragile, lost world.
"Starred Review. Although it is easy and appropriate to take this novel as stark commentary on U.S. involvement in Iraq, its most powerful moments explore a much deeper and more abstract ambivalence about tribalism and its allure." - Booklist
"Despite the novel's ability to capture its place and time, its characters and story (including the revelations) never really take off." -Publishers Weekly
"Strange, otherworldly and somewhat sinister." - Kirkus
"Olshan has written a mystery within a broader genre of postcolonial literature, sans historicity. Readers who appreciate the work of Amitav Ghosh (The Glass Palace) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Purple Hibiscus) will find similar themes running through this enjoyable debut." - Library Journal
"A first novel of considerable maturity: powerful, original, cunningly constructed, and timely." - Julian Barnes, author of The Sense of an Ending
This information about Marshlands 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.
Matthew Olshan is the author of The Flown Sky, a fantasy for young readers, and Finn, a novel for young adults. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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