Yellowfish

SYNOPSIS: "Ginarn Taam, a traveler from Communist China was born in San Francisco. He is returning to America, an agile little man of thirty-five with a wicker basket and the composure of a Zen master. He is to be smuggled from Vancouver to Reno and then to San Francisco along with three young illegal Chinese immigrants, know as 'Yellowfish.' Their driver is a farmer, machinist, occasionally a cocaine runner. His task is complicated by several facts: one of the young men is slowly dying of a knife wound, his relief driver is an amorous woman, and his car is being followed."

"A novel of grandeur and daring, a book of fierce pleasures. Its themes are those that have occupied the great story-tellers from the beginning: the journey of self-discovery, danger and self reliance." - Raymond Carver

"A complex, almost Faulknerian portrait of the Pacific Northwest - as beautiful and mysterious as the area itself. It is also a hell of a good read." - James Welch

"Its surface is a stunning story of survival; its depth is the American journey to the West. They reflect each other, for Yellowfish is a new version of how the West was and is won by lost people. A bright vision of the morals of necessity, beautifully told." - Mary Lee Settle

"One golden book. A Western worthy of the name . . . yet mystical, timeless, universal." - Chicago Sun Times

"John Keeble has written a thrilling book. . . . He has a fine ear for dialogue; all of his people live and breathe on the page; the men are wonderfully drawn, and the women! - the women are superb. . . . I want you to read this book, cherish it, lend it to your friends." - Carolyn Kizer, Northwest Review

"The author restores the tired abstractions of great Western space and silence with fresh feelings of motion and flight. Both animals and men are hunted in this hard though never heartless book. The prey die with fierce dignity and the predators do not gloat." - Time

"Along comes John Keeble, loaded with panache and talent. . . . Keeble has done nothing less than fashion a new way of looking at a region of the earth, a country and its people." - Toronto Globe and Mail