Idaho

(Paperback)

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Opening with an act of inexplicable violence, Idaho is a stunning debut about loss, grief and redemption **WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD** 'I love Idaho' Paula Hawkins, bestselling author of The Girl on the Train This sharp, stunning debut novel and Irish bestseller about grief, loss and redemption is your next literary obsession One hot August day a family drives to a mountain clearing to collect birch wood. Jenny, the mother, is in charge of lopping any small limbs off the logs with a hatchet. Wade, the father, does the stacking. The two daughters, June and May, aged nine and six, drink lemonade, swat away horseflies, bicker, sing snatches of songs as they while away the time. But then Jenny does something unspeakable, an act so extreme it will scatter the family in every different direction, and leave dark unanswered questions for years to come. 'Unflinching.multi-layered storytelling that is both beautiful and devastating' Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry 'A puzzle that enthrals from the outset' Guardian 'Hauntingly brilliant, this book will stay with you for days after you've put it down' Evening Standard, Books of the Year

Reviews

I love Idaho for the sparse beauty of its prose, the unsolvable mystery at its heart, the cleverly constructed non-linear narrative and its preoccupations which so closely match my own -- Paula Hawkins * Guardian *
Writing that has the cool sharpness of lemonade... Unflinching, unfrilly, multi-layered storytelling that is both beautiful and devastating -- Rachel Joyce
Hauntingly brilliant, this book will stay with you for days after youve put it down * Evening Standard, Books of the Year *
You're in masterly hands here... will remind many of the great Idaho novel, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping... wrenching and beautiful * New York Times Book Review *
From the first page it is clear that Ruskovichs poetic, spare writing would be enough to compel on its own, but this extraordinary story of a violent event that decimates a young family in northern Idaho is the true engine here. Its a puzzle that enthrals from the outset. -- Lucy Clark * Guardian *

Author Bio

Emily Ruskovich grew up in the Idaho Panhandle, on Hoodoo mountain. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, One Story and the Virginia Quarterly Review. A winner of a 2015 O. Henry Award and a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she now teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado, Denver. Idaho is her first novel.