Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's newest novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness-and explores what happens when two powerful personalities begin to break the rules.
Vanessa Cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress with a scandalous past. But on July 4, 1936, at her family's country home in the Adirondack Mountains, two events coincide to permanently alter the course of Vanessa's life: her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, and a mysteriously seductive local artist, Jordan Groves, lands his biplane at the Cole's dock....
Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondack wilderness to the skies above war-torn Spain, The Reserve is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author's extraordinary repertoire.
Christian Science Monitor
...Banks has immersed himself in the time he’s writing about and manages to evoke Hemingway without ever aping his style...
Miami Herald
...[Russell Banks] carved out a reputation with words, bu producing some of the best fiction of our time.
San Diego Union-Tribune
[The Reserve]...holds lessons for our own time. It’s a supremely well-written book...
Boston Sunday Globe
Banks’s new novel, The Reserve, may well be the bestand darkestwork of fiction written to date about the storied regiou of high peaks, glacial lakes, and vast forests covering an area nearly teh size of Massachusetts.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Banks peels back [the characters’] gloss so that we can enter their interior.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Banks...displays a vivid immediacy that puts you right in the middle of things.
Express
The Reserve is a page-turner from the moment mad beauty Vanessa Cole insinuates herself aboard the biplane of Hemingway-esque antihero Jordan Groves.
Deseret News
[The Reserve] is beautifully and elegantly written, showing the author as a lover of language....[T]his powerful and beautiful Russell Banks novel is close to a masterpiece.
Chicago Sun-Times
As a love letter to the mountains and greenery and water, [The Reserve] conveys deep feeling.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The novel’s strength...is the story Banks has to tell... ‘The Reserve’ captures the drama, not just of these characters’ lives, but of this moment in American history.
Los Angeles Times
...[A]n almost pot-boiling love story set against a backdrop of global unrest and clearly demarcated class tensions...[it] has character and sceneas well as suspense and surprisein abundance.
Deseret Morning News
...this powerful and beautiful Russell Banks novel is close to a masterpiece.
Elle Magazine
...sexy, almost guilty pleasure of a read...
William Kennedy
A cool noir thriller...This is new and wonderful turf for this masterful storyteller.
Scott Turow
A vividly imagined book. It has the romantic atmosphere of those great 1930s tales in film and prose, and it speeds the reader along from its first pages…Banks’ talents are so large - and the novel so fundamentally engaging…THE RESERVE is a pleasure well worth savoring.
Boston Globe
Banks’s willingness to confront… the hard truths about the world we live in… goes a long way toward explaining his longstanding reputation as one of America’s finest contemporary fiction writers.
Michael Ondaatje
Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. I trust his portraits of America more than any other.
Cornel West
Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.
From the Publisher
A master storyteller.” - The Nation
“Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks.” - New York Times Book Review“Banks knows how to keep the reader glued to the page.” - Edmonton Journal
“Russell Banks [is] one of America’s most elegant literary voices.” - The Vancouver Sun
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