A Marriage on the Rocks and a Bleak House - Built Log-by-Log

Fiction Caribou Island By David Vann Viking Pounds 8.99

David Vann's debut collection of stories, Legend of a Suicide, was one of the most brilliant pieces of fiction to be published in the past five years, and the proof copy of this, his first novel, comes with an array of ecstatic quotes from that first book plastered over it. "An American classic" and "jaw-droppingly powerful" are not even the most effusive, but for once the hype is justified. Legend of a Suicide was an instinctive and visceral fictional reworking of the true story of Vann's father's suicide when he was a teenager, with a twist in its central novella that had to be read to be …