Fallen Land

Description

Poplar Farm has been in Louise's family for generations, inherited by her sharecropping forebear from a white landowner after a lynching. Now, the farm has been carved up, the trees torn down; a mini-massacre replicating the destruction of lives and societies taking place all over America. Architect of this destruction is Paul Krovik, a property developer soon driven insane by the failure of his dream. Julia and Nathaniel arrive from Chicago with their son, Copley, and buy up Paul's signature home in a foreclosure sale. They move into the half-finished subdivision and settle in to their brave new world. Yet violence lies just beneath the surface of this land, and simmers deep within Nathaniel. The great trees bear witness, Louise lives on in her beleaguered farmhouse, and as reality shifts, and the edges of what is right and wrong blur and are lost, Copley becomes convinced that someone is living in the house with them.

Patrick Flanery was born in California in 1975 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a BFA in Film from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts he worked for three years in the film industry before moving to the UK, where he completed a doctorate in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Oxford. As well as publishing scholarly articles on British and South African literature and film in a number of academic journals, he has written for Slightly Foxed and The Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.

A gripping thriller and a superb portrayal of how ordinary men can veer into madness, but its real power lies in its recognition of the tragic failure of an American dream -- John Burnside * Guardian * Thrillingly tense and atmospheric... Comparisons to Nathaniel Hawthorne would not be extravagant * Financial Times * Gripping... As the tension builds to the denouement, the reader wonders whether hope and justice will triumph over a power devoid of ethics. A fine book * Independent on Sunday * Gripping... Fallen Land impressively examines how thoroughly the American dream has turned into the American nightmare * Sunday Times *