Set in the rugged region of the Midwest that gives the novel its title, The Driftless Area is the story of Pierre Hunter, a young bartender with unfailing optimism, a fondness for coin tricks, and an uncanny capacity for finding trouble. When he falls in love with the mysterious and isolated Stella Rosmarin, Pierre becomes the central player in a revenge drama he must unravel and bring to its shocking conclusion. Along the way he will liberate seventy-seven thousand dollars from a murderous thief, summon the resources that have eluded him all his life, and come to question the very meaning of chance and mortality.
Nothing is as it seems in The Driftless Area—identities shift, violent secrets lie in wait, the future can cause the past, and love becomes a mission that can take you beyond this world. In its tender, cool irony, The Driftless Area recalls the best of neo-noir, and its cast of bona fide small-town eccentrics adrift in the American Midwest make for a clever and deeply pleasurable read from one of our most beloved authors.
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“Carefully crafted and plotted…A highly enjoyable but hard-to-classify novel. Drury’s evocative depiction of small-town life and an unpredictable plot with a touch of the supernatural will appeal to the same readers who enjoy independent films.”
— Library Journal
“Sparkling…Drury is a master at showing extraordinary things happening to ordinary people—and it’s always a fun ride.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“This fine, ambling novel ends with a tug of war between the spiritual we don’t altogether trust and the grind we’re somehow unable to resist.”
— New York Times“Drury has a knack for entertainingly weird detail that shines throughout.”
— Publishers Weekly“Deadpan wit, cosmic melancholy, characters both ethereal and down and dirty, predicaments a Beckett character would accept as inevitable, and a porous divide between the living and the dead add up to a delectably unnerving outlaw fairy tale.”
— BooklistBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Tom Drury is the author of several novels, including The End of Vandalism, Hunts in Dreams, The Driftless Area, and The Black Brook. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Mississippi Review, and he has been named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.