Author(s): Michael Collins

Fiction

A searing novel from the author of the Booker-shortlisted The Keepers of Truth. Set in the frozen wastes of North America, Collins brings his serrated-edge prose to a blackly comic story of the unquiet dead. Small town America is Michael Collins's heart of darkness, a territory he maps with infinite precision in this novel of murder and menace. Twenty years ago, when Frank was five, his parents burned to death in a remote Michigan town. Now, Frank's uncle is dead too, shot by a mysterious stranger with a dead man's name, a stranger who now lies in a coma in the local hospital. Frank wants answers about his own past, and he believes that the stranger, who hangs between life and death, might be able to supply them.