Accordion Crimes

Description

Reissued to coincide with THAT OLD ACE IN THE HOLE (Jan 03), the new novel from the Pulitzer-prize winning author of 'The Shipping News'. In 'Accordion Crimes' the hallucinatory power of Proulx's language and the radiance of her sentences confirm her genius. Accordion Crimes is a masterpiece of story-telling that spans a century and a continent. It opens in 1890 in Sicily, when an accordion maker and his son, carrying little more than his finest button accordion, begin their voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynch mob, but his instrument carries the novel into another community of immigrants, German-Americans, founding a new town in South Dakota. Moving from South Dakota to Texas, from Montana to Maine, the nine instantly compelling and intricately connected sections of the novel illuminate the lives of the founders of a nation, descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Germans, the Irish, Scots, and Franco-Canadians. Through the music of the accordion they express their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance.

E. Annie Proulx is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Shipping News" and the acclaimed 'Accordion Crimes'. She was born in 1935 in Connecticut USA, where her family have lived since 1635, but has spent most of her life in Vermont. She has been a newspaper editor, medical writer, historian and author. Her first book was a collection of short stories, 'Heart Songs and Other Stories'. Her first novel, 'Postcards', was published when she was in her 50s.

'This novel confirms Proulx as one of the greatest American writers.' Independent 'The detail is breathtaking, her ear for dialogue matchless, her observation unsentimental, her pace infectious. She tackles death, sex and the gruesome with black hilarity and the skills of a born storyteller. Rich and dense, Accordion Crimes is a splendid novel.' The Times 'Annie Proulx has written an epic social history of America and the plight of the immigrant, which is astonishing in its breadth, heroic in the scale of its ambition and brilliant in its manner of realising them.' Daily Mail 'The glorious richness of the language continually makes you pause in wonder, the details pile up and surround you.' Scotsman 'Her range and scope are tremendous, shuttling through the warp of multiple cultures and spanning, by the end, 100 years. And it is the range of detail that grips, richly concrete.' Spectator 'Vigorous, salty and extraordinary.' The Times