American Gods TV tie-in edition* - Softcover

Neil Gaiman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1472249089 ISBN 13: 9781472249081

Publisher: HACHETTE, 2017

Synopsis

American Gods, the extraordinary, highly acclaimed epic novel from storytelling genius and international bestseller Neil Gaiman, comes vividly to life in a major new TV series on Amazon Prime Video starring Ricky Whittle, Ian McShane, Emily Browning and Gillian Anderson.

'Gaiman is a treasure-house of story and we are lucky to have him' Stephen King.

If you are to survive, you must believe.

Shadow Moon has served his time. But hours before his release from prison, his beloved wife is killed in a freak accident. Dazed, he boards a plane home where he meets the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who professes both to know Shadow and to be king of America.

Together they embark on a profoundly strange road trip across the USA, encountering a kaleidoscopic cast of characters along the way. Yet all around them a storm threatens to break.

The war has already begun, an epic struggle for the very soul of America, and Shadow is standing squarely in its path.

About this title

Review

American Gods is Neil Gaiman's best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit. Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn't sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he's been delivering since his Sandman days.

Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost--the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book.

Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow's road story is the heart of the novel, and it's here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book--the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. "This is a bad land for Gods," says Shadow.

More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country--our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what's real and what's not. --Therese Littleton

From the Publisher

American Gods by Neil Gaiman has won the 2001 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel at the Horror Writers Association Annual Meeting held that was held June 7-9 in New York City.

Edition details

• Publisher: HACHETTE
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1472249089
• ISBN 13: 9781472249081
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 736