Book description
'How can you talk about being civil when innocent animals are being
tortured to death? Civil? I'll be civil when the killing's done.'
The island of Anacapa, off the coast of California, is overrun with
black rats which are threatening the ancient population of
ground-nesting birds. Alma Boyd Takesue of the National Park Service is
the spokesperson for a campaign to exterminate these man-introduced
rodents once and for all. Alma, highly self-disciplined with a stubborn
streak, speaks as a conservationist, though the fact that her
grandmother was once stranded on Anacapa for three weeks with nothing
but thousands of crawling rats for company might explain some of her zeal.
With days to go before the aerial rat-poisoning, Alma's plan is in
danger of sabotage. Dave LaJoy and Anise Reed, a pair of notorious
environmental activists, are recognisable from a distance by his knotted
dreadlocks and her flame-red cyclone of hair. Dave is an electronics
salesman with barely-controlled rages, for whom the plight of the rats
is yet another of life's many injustices, along with lazy tramps and
second-rate wine. Anise is a struggling folk singer with her own,
terrible reasons for getting involved in 'the cause'.
From the outset, Alma, Dave and Anise are at ideological loggerheads.
But when Alma's sights turn to the infestation of non-native pigs on
Santa Cruz - where Anise was brought up by her single mother and a clan
of ranchers - the stakes are raised, and the debate threatens to boil
over into something much more real…
When the Killing's Done
is T. C. Boyle's blistering new novel, a sweeping epic of family,
ecology and the right to life - no matter what the fallout. T. C.
Boyle's novels include World's End
, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Tortilla Curtain
, Riven Rock
, A Friend of the Earth
, Drop City
(which was a finalist for the National Book Awards), The Inner Circle
and, most recently, the highly acclaimed The Women
. His short story collections include After the Plague
, Tooth and Claw
and Wild Child
, and his stories appear regularly in most major magazines, including
the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Granta and the Paris Review. His work
has been translated into twenty-five languages.
T. C. Boyle was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters.
He lives in California.
