- 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.
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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
From the Same Author
Dog Run Moon
Callan Wink
A construction worker is chased through the night by a shady local businessman whose dog he has stolen; a Wild West re-enactor is engaged in a long-running affair with the Indian ‘squaw’ who slays him on the battlefield every year; a boy is tasked by his father to rid the farm of cats. Playing out against the rugged backdrop of the untamed West, these stories are populated by characters who are toughened by life but still tender enough to bleed, to cry, to care, and to dream.
With its taut plotting and calloused sensibility, Dog Run Moon is written deep in the American grain, and yet Callan Wink’s humour, empathy and layered storytelling creates a fictional world entirely his own. This remarkable debut reminds you just how effortlessly powerful good writing can be.
£12.99
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‘He’d come to tell her that he was leaving. It seemed rather impossible now – the telling, not the leaving.’
