Book description
The third novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Shipping
News', 'Accordion Crimes' spans generations, continents and a century
and confirms the hallucinatory power of Proulx's writing.
'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, Irish, Scots and Franco-Canadians. Through the
music of the accordion they express their fantasies, sorrows and
exuberance. '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, a hundred years. And it is
the range of detail that grips, richly concrete.' Spectator
'Vigorous, salty and extraordinary.' The Times Annie Proulx published
her first novel 'Postcards' in 1991 at the age of 56. 'The Shipping
News' won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award and
the Irish Times International Prize. Her third novel, 'Accordion
Crimes', was published in 1996. She is also the author of three
short-story collections, 'Heart Songs' (1994), 'Close Range' (1999) and
'Bad Dirt' (2004). 'Brokeback Mountain' was made into an Oscar-winning
film in 2005. 'Fine Just the Way It Is', her third collection of Wyoming
short stories, was published in 2008.
