The Cadence of Grass

Description

'A writer of the first magnitude...McGuane is a virtuoso' - New York Times This is the story of the Whitelaws, a family whose values are as far flung as the territory they helped settle, and whose most recent generations have pioneered the landscape of dysfunction. The patriarch, Sunny Jim, exerts his perverse control even posthumously, by means of a last will and testament that binds the family fortune to a marriage that ought, by general consent, to be rent asunder. The charms of this particular son-in-law, lately released from prison, are potent if short-lived; Evelyn Whitelaw, his estranged wife, is quite literally bedevilled by them. And as her mother and sister court this twisted inheritance, her own yearnings point toward a way of life once habitual on the western plains but now embodied only by Bill Champion, the family's ranch foreman and Evelyn's one true compass. The Cadence of Grass is at once an elegy and a masterpiece of savage comedy from one of the most compelling novelists writing today.

Thomas McGuane is the author of short fiction, screenplays, essays and several highly acclaimed novels, including The Sporting Club, The Bushwacked Piano, Ninety-two in the Shade, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and, most recently, The Longest Silence- A Life in Fishing. He was born in Michigan and now lives with his family in McLeod, Montana.

The vivid characterisations of his snapshot prose remain startlingly original and exact... Chilling, bleak, and resonant. McGuane is an inventive writer, and a gifted stylist * Guardian * I don't know of another writer who can walk Thomas McGuane's literary high wire...He can describe the sky, a bird, a rock, the dawn, with such grace that you want to go see for your self; then he can zip to a scene so funny that it makes you laugh out loud * New York Times Book Review * One of America's most important literary writers, whose prose style has been compared to such American sensibilities as Hemingway and Faulkner * Los Angeles Herald Examiner * One of the most original American novelists on either side of the Mississippi * Time *