The Cove: A Novel - Tapa blanda

Ron Rash is a writer of both the darkly beautiful and the sadly true; his new novel, The Cove, solidifies his reputation as one of our very finest novelists. (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls)

I wish the whole world spoke the way Ron Rash's characters do. Read him for his poetry and great humanity. Just read him. (Jennifer Haigh, author of Faith)

The award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Serena returns to Appalachia following WWI to tell the story of a German prisoner who escapes an internment camp in North Carolina and the woman who saves his life.

Laurel Shelton and her brother Hank are living out on farmland in the shadow of a deep cove the locals say is cursed. And maybe it is. Laurel is born with a large birthmark that neighbors take as a sign of witchery. Hank loses an arm while serving overseas in WWI. When Hank falls in love with a woman who refuses to live there, Hank secretly plans to leave his sister behind.

But Laurel's fate is forever altered when she comes upon a stranger in the woods one day, a stranger she saves from a near-fatal accident. With only a simple haversack of worldly belongings, including his treasured flute and a note explaining that he is mute and bound for New York, the stranger slowly insinuates himself into life in the Cove, helping Hank on the farm, playing his ethereal music in the long twilit evenings, and, eventually, bringing Laurel the only real happiness she has ever known.

But when Laurel stumbles onto his real identity, she realizes the profound danger they are in, not only from men like Chauncey Feith, an army recruiter determined to show his mettle by stoking fear and outrage over all things German (harassing an aging language professor at the nearby college, purging the library of any suspect foreign material), but also from her own brother, Hank, whose rage at the enemy who maimed him is barely contained beneath his placid surface.

In a page-turning climax as heart-rending and tightly plotted as the brilliant dénouement of Serena, these characters lock horns with history and reveal Ron Rash once again to be a masterful novelist at the height of his powers.