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  2. Ebooks
  3. Marshlands

EBOOK

Marshlands

A Novel

Matthew Olshan
4
(3)
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Pages
176
Year
2014
Language
English
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About

After years alone in a cell, an aging prisoner is released without explanation, expelled into a great city now utterly unfamiliar to him. Broken by years of brutality at the hands of the prison guards, he scrounges for scraps, sleeping wild, until a museum curator rescues him from an assault. The museum has just opened its most controversial exhibit: a perfect replica of the marshes, an expansive wilderness still wracked by conflict. There the man had spent years as a doctor among the hated and feared marshmen, who have been colonized but never conquered.

Then Marshlands reveals one of its many surprises: it is written in reverse. The novel leaps backward once, twice, returning to the marshes and unraveling time to reveal the doctor's ambiguous relationship to the austerely beautiful land and its people. As the pieces of his past come together, a great crime and its consequences begin to take shape. The true nature of the crime and who committed it will be saved for the breathtaking ending-or, rather, for the beginning.

Related Subjects

  • War & Military
  • Adult Fiction
  • Literary

Reviews

"A first novel of human suffering and love in a war-torn wilderness, constructed with great verve and brilliance."
Jesse Norman, New Statesman
"Powerful."
Booklist (Starred Review)
"Olshan's devastatingly beautiful novel is more than a powerful critique of the senselessness of war. Marshlands is a gripping story about the dangers of idealism, the bonds that can form across cultures, and the complicated nature of betrayal . . . Marshlandsis a searing and evocative book that establishes Olshan as a writer to follow, and articulates the value of compassion and ethics amidst the
Laura Eggertson, The Toronto Star

Artists

Matthew OlshanAuthor