August | Granta

  • Published: 02/07/2020
  • ISBN: 9781847088109
  • Granta Books
  • 304 pages

August

Callan Wink

August is an average twelve year old – he likes dogs and fishing, and doesn’t even mind early morning chores on his family’s farm. When his parents’ marriage falls apart and he has to start over in a new town, he tries hard to be an average teen – playing football and doing his homework – but he struggles to form friendships, and when a shocking act of violence pushes him off course once more, he flees to rural Montana. There, as he throws himself into work on a ranch, he comes to learn that even the smallest of communities have secrets and even the most broken of families have a bond.

Beautifully written and unfolding against an epic American landscape, August is a compelling, authentic and poignant story of the joys and traumas that irrevocably shape us all.

Wink has a precise, clear prose style...The landscape is a character in itself - well-known, but changeable... Wink skilfully imbues his writing with a subtle sense of foreboding that never leaves... In this tightly controlled yet highly unpredictable novel we discover what it is like to come of age in a part of America that is always changing, always the same

Guardian

Callan Wink [...] reconfigures the landscape of the American West

Irish Times

Spun from the raw earth of the American heartland, August is a bruised and elegant poem to belonging. Wink's precise prose, tender and savage, make him a master of broken things

Karl Geary

The Author

CALLAN WINK has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays appear widely, including in the New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, Playboy, Men’s Journal, and The Best American Short Stories anthology. His first book, Dog Run Moon, was short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize and received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River.

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