Thanksgiving

by Michael Dibdin

Overview

Thanksgiving is a novel about love, sex, compulsion, midlife, and death, and about the power of the past to distort, shape, and reveal the present.

Anthony is a British journalist whose American wife, Lucy, has suddenly died. Grieving and haunted, he becomes obsessed with her youth and the years before he met her. To find out more, he travels to a remote part of the Nevada desert to meet Lucy's first husband. Their bizarre encounter, with its violent climax, marks the beginning of a journey that takes him across the world, to the edge of madness and into the darkest corners of the human heart. It is a journey in which he is hunted, haunted, never at peace, and never far from the woman he still loves.

Sparely and unflinchingly written, unfolding with a spellbinding rhythm, as riveting as the obsession it tracks, Thanksgiving subtly reveals with precision, compassion, and resolution the emotional turmoil of an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances. It is a brilliant departure for Michael Dibdin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375726071
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/13/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Michael Dibdin was born in England and raised in Northern Ireland. He attended Sussex University and the University of Alberta in Canada. He spent five years in Perugia, Italy, where he taught English at the local university. He went on to live in Oxford, England and Seattle, Washington. He was the author of eighteen novels, eleven of them in the popular Aurelio Zen series, including Ratking, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and Cabal, which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He died in 2007.

Read an Excerpt

Thanksgiving is a moving portrait of the profound effects of love when all that seems to remain is loss and grief. Unhinged by his wife’s unexpected death, Anthony, a middle-aged Seattle journalist, becomes obsessed with her past. He drives through the Nevada desert to locate her ex-husband looking for some unnamable solace. But, what awaits him is a bizarre and violent encounter with the past that entangles Anthony with his half-estranged stepchildren, the police, and his own disquieted mind and that only makes Lucy’s ghostly presence seem all the more real. The crisp dialogue, shadowy atmosphere, and sharp pacing of a master crime writer work to great effect in this arresting story that toys with the precipice of insanity and the extremes of passion and loss. This is a splendid shadow play on the enduring human mystery of love.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
Michael Dibdin?s ingenuity and mastery of style and form have earned him numerous accolades, a devoted readership, and the undisguised envy of his peers. Although he is best known in the United States for his incomparable Aurelio Zen series, it would be an injustice to pigeonhole Dibdin solely as a mystery writer. In each of his novels, he has consistently transcended the mechanics of the mystery at hand to investigate the larger, less neatly solvable mysteries of the human heart and soul.

In Thanksgiving, Dibdin continues to internalize the process of investigation, cleverly subverting genre conventions to create an intensely personal meditation on loss, obsession, erotic desire, and power of the past.

Here, the narrator is an expatriate British journalist, Anthony "Tony" Baines. But it is Tony?s wife, Lucy, who is the novel?s iconic, central figure -- a feat of authorial legerdemain all the more remarkable given that Lucy is recently dead (a casualty of a commercial airline disaster) and appears in the book only through the persistence of memory, and the odd spectral cameo. Bereft of his one great love, denied the promise of their future together, Tony decides to lay claim to the last remaining vestiges of Lucy?s life -- her past.

The trouble is, Lucy?s past doesn?t rightly belong to him. The particulars of Lucy?s Life Before Tony are currently the exclusive property of her first husband, Darryl Bob Allen, a onetime sexual athlete and all-around professional failure whose true calling is audio/video voyeurism. On the pretext of settling Lucy?s estate, Tony heads out to a remote patch of Nevada desert to talk to Darryl Bob. And in the event that Darryl Bob should prove to be less than forthcoming, he brings a gun. Just in case.

Having marshaled the necessary elements -- grief, lust, jealousy, even a convenient "murder" weapon -- Dibdin promptly proceeds to confound expectations. Instead of the murder mystery for which we have been prepared, Thanksgiving reveals itself to be something more ambitious: the story of one man coming to terms with his own past, and his redemption through the undying power of love. (Greg Marrs)

bn.com

Michael Dibdin, known and admired as a writer of sophisticated mystery novels, takes a different turn in this short, elliptical, haunting novel. It begins in the desert of Nevada and ends on the seacoast of France. Not many pages are in between, but they are packed with intelligence, feeling and mystery, albeit mystery of a different sort to which Dibdin's readers are accustomed....Thanksgiving may seem an odd sort of love story, but it's a love story all the same. Only the stoniest of souls could fail to be moved by it.
— Washington Post

Jonathan Yardley

A middle-aged British journalist based in Seattle tracks down his deceased wife's first husband in this novel of nostalgia and obsession, a departure for Dibdin, author of the popular Aurelio Zen mystery series. After the death of his American wife, Lucy, in a plane crash, Anthony travels to Nevada to visit Darryl Bob, Lucy's creepy and reclusive former husband, who lives in a trailer filled with porn photos of Lucy and audiotapes of her adulterous trysts. Shortly after Anthony leaves Darryl Bob's trailer, Darryl Bob is found dead. Although Anthony is blameless, he is a suspect because his handgun is found in the trailer--but only because Darryl Bob bought it when Anthony began to brandish it in agitation at Darryl Bob's sarcasm. Gradually, Anthony shakes himself loose of the murder charge. Retreating to his parents' vacation home in France, he works toward adjusting to the reality of his wife's death, despite imagined visits from her ghost. A touching flashback to his courtship of Lucy and transcriptions of his past conversations with her further fleshes out Dibdin's portrait of the couple. Snapping along persuasively as it skips back and forth in time, the novel perceptively questions the boundaries of intimacy and love, though it sometimes moves too smoothly for its own good. Although Anthony's path toward psychological repair is attentively chronicled, we never really become acquainted with his personality--he remains a cipher throughout. (Mar. 29) Forecast: Dibdin shifts easily to literary fiction with this capable offering, but his mysteries are livelier and arguably more substantial. Fans may go along for the ride, but they will surely clamor for the speedy return of Aurelio Zen. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In his previous novels, which include the Aurelio Zen series, Michael Dibdin has strayed beyond the boundaries of mystery fiction, but he discards the trappings of the genre altogether in this portrait of a man stricken by grief after his wife is killed in an airplane crash.” — The New York Times

“Yes, Thanksgiving is a thriller…a thriller about those old standbys, love and death. Oh yes, and grief and memory and aging. It’s a thriller all right — physical and metaphysical — and clever Dibdin pulls it off neatly.” — The Globe and Mail

From the Publisher