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“A taut, muscular, and often unforgettable journey into the heart of darkness. Epic, relentless, and beautifully realized.”
— Dennis Lehane, New York Times bestselling author
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“Hold the Dark is a chilling, mysterious, and completely engaging novel that will keep readers turning pages late into the night. The cold and unforgiving Alaskan wild becomes much more than a backdrop for this spellbinding story. It becomes a character—a living creature with its own hungers, its own secrets, its own icy motives, its own implacable will. I was entranced.”
— Tim O’Brien, National Book Award-winning author of Going after Cacciato
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“Girald’s unrelenting, perfectly
paced prose whips the book along to an unnerving conclusion. By the end, we
feel, as Core does ‘that man belongs neither in civilization nor nature—because
we are aberrations between two states of being.’”
— New Yorker
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“Fierce, extraordinary…Hold the Dark is an unnerving and intimate portrayal of nature gone
awry. It’s all but bereft of levity, spectacularly violent, and exquisitely
written.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“Maybe it all began with Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in 1938, but there is a
variety of modern thriller, created these days by Robert Stone and Denis
Johnson at their best, that delivers narrative thrust and beautifully composed
sentences by the pageful even as it peels away the thin membrane that separates
entertainment from art, and nature from civilization. Here’s Boston writer
William Giraldi adding to the slender ranks of such masterly fiction…[Hold the Dark] certainly stands out as
one of the decade’s best books of its kind, and one that deserves, because of
its stylish flaunting of some of our darkest fears, a future readership.”
— Boston Globe
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“There’s an oddness and otherness to this place, and
Giraldi speaks its taut, original language. To appreciate its power fully, Hold the Dark should be read closely—not
so much for clues to the mystery but rather for an appreciation of how language
bridges worlds.”
— Chicago Tribune
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“Hold the Dark is a mystery novel
with all the right ingredients: tough characters, beautifully dangerous
landscapes, revenge, a detective on the chase, a husband going after his wife,
and enough bullet casings to rattle in the mind long after the story is
finished.”
— Washington Review of Books
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“Utterly brilliant…Hold the Dark
is that rarest of literary beasts: a novel whose sentences gleam like gemstones
but whose pages carry you along like a bullet train.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
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“Hold the Dark is a powerful meditation on nature, violence, and responsibility with the concentration of a fable or fever dream—a book hard to get out of your mind long after you’ve put it down.”
— Thomas McGuane, National Book Award–nominated author of Ninety-Two in the Shade
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“Giraldi’s back-country Alaska is a savagely amoral
place where the constant struggle for survival brings out the most elemental
aspects of humanity. This work travels deep into the most ancient and primitive
realms of being, offering an unflinching—and more than a little
frightening—exploration of the domains of the unconscious that are more
commonly the province of myth and fairy tale.”
— Library Journal (starred review)
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“Some novels seem ready-made for Hollywood to
gobble up and spin into a film script. Giraldi’s second novel comes
close to fitting this easy mold. However, despite how well he can write
an action scene, his carefully developed themes and characters transcend
the Hollywood model…Written in a
galloping prose embedded with a hard poetry, Hold the Dark will not disappoint disciples of action fiction.”
— Booklist
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“Snow, ice, wolves, murder, and dark love are encountered in Hold the Dark, William Giraldi’s hard, unflinching, and powerful novel. This story and the telling of it have the clout and rigor of a Norse Saga.”
— Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone
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“Richard
Ferrone’s gravelly voice suits this story of human and animal violence…Ferrone’s narration is easy to follow and well
paced. He does a good job with the dialogue among the tough guys who make up
the bulk of the characters. This is not just a story about wolves or Alaska. It’s
about the human condition.”
— AudioFile