- Published: 04/11/2021
- ISBN: 9781783787623
- Granta Books
- 128 pages
Train Dreams
Denis Johnson
Robert Grainier is a day labourer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century – an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainier struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.
Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West – its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge-builders – Train Dreams captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.
£10.00
To have written something this concise, this muscular, this moving and - yes, why not say it? - this eternal, seems little short of miraculous. But we have come to expect miracles from Johnson. In this age of plodding bandwagons and slavish imitation, Johnson is a one-hundred-per-cent authentic American original and an undisputed master of his craft
Rupert Thomson
A masterpiece... one of the best prose writers in our time
Michael Ondaatje, Herald
I don't think there is a sentence in the book that isn't perfectly made
Ann Patchett, New York Times
From the Same Author
Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson
Jesus’ Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiralling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The narrator of these interlinked stories is a young, unnamed man, reeling from his addiction to heroin and alcohol, his mind at once clouded and made brilliantly lucid by these drugs. In the course of his adventures, he meets an assortment of people, who seem as alienated and confused as he; sinners, misfits, the lost, the damned, the desperate and the forgotten. Our of their bleak, seemingly random lives, Denis Johnson creates modern-day parables of a harsh and devastating beauty.
£8.99
Denis Johnson on Granta.com
Fiction | The Online Edition
Train Dreams
Denis Johnson
In the summer of 1917 Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle.
Fiction | The Online Edition
Happy Hour
Denis Johnson
The day was ending in a fiery and glorious way. The ships on the Sound looked like paper silhouettes being sucked up into the sun.
