Carthage - Softcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007485751 ISBN 13: 9780007485758

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2014

Synopsis

A young girl’s disappearance rocks a community and a family, in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice and the atrocities of war, from literary legend Joyce Carol Oates.

Cressida Mayfield has gone missing. The desperate search yields but one clue; she was last seen in the company of Corporal Brett Kincaid, Iraq veteran – and the ex-fiancé of Cressida’s sister. As the deeply traumatized Kincaid struggles to mount a defence, he finds his memories of that terrible night are tangled with those of the most appalling wartime savagery.

Dark and riveting, the nerve-shredding Carthage unravels the devastating consequences of violence on two young lives, while probing the very limits of our capacity for forgiveness.

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Review

“Knotted, tense, digressive and brilliant.” (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))

Oates (The Accursed) returns with another novel that ratchets up the unsettling to her signature feverish pitch... Once again, Oates’s gift for exposing the frailty--and selfishness--of humans is on display. (Publishers Weekly (starred review))

“After her lavishly imagined, supernatural historical novel, The Accursed (2013), Oates turns in the latest of her intensely magnified studies of a family in crisis and the agony of a misfit girl.” (Booklist)

“Joyce Carol Oates has outdone herself.” (NPR)

“Joyce Carol Oates is known for richly detailed portraits of American families asunder. CARTHAGE is a stunning contribution to her storied canon.” (Kirkus)

“...Oates shows how perilous it is to assign guilt, and how hard it is to draw the line between victim and perpetrator in a blurred moral landscape in which every crime, on the battlefield or on the home front, is a crime of conscience.” (New York Times Book Review)

“For pages on end it is a compelling mediation on belief, betrayal, and grief. Oates has written a good book. I’d recommend it. What does it matter if it is or is not a war novel. The best war novels aren’t war novels at all. They become something bigger.” (Daily Beast)

“...brilliant...amazing.... A compassionate tenderness suffuses the final sections of the book, as palpable as the cold irony with which the book begins. It’s a breathtaking effect...” (Washington Post)

“Oates, working at the top of her formidable game, handily won over more of our readers with this raw, suspenseful, ‘real and immersive’ stream-of-consciousness tale.” (Elle, Lettres 2014 Readers Prize)

“a well-told tale of family, grief and faith” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

“Irresistible page-turner and heady intellectual experience... Oates continues to make her mark as one of the greatest American writers of our time.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

“Emphatically and artfully explores the subject of physical and emotional distances between loved ones, the various expanses between who individuals are, were, or could be, and the often barely perceptible gaps between guilt and innocence.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)

“...one of America’s greatest writers...” (Roanoke Times)

Edition details

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007485751
• ISBN 13: 9780007485758
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400