O's 2010 Summer Reading List
Lush historical novels, wise contemporary tales, thrillers that will scare the dickens out of you. (And speaking of Dickens, we've got him, too.)
1 of 20
Kings of the Earth
By Jon Clinch
416 pages;
Random House
For his acclaimed debut, Finn, Jon Clinch borrowed from Mark
Twain, telling the story of Huckleberry Finn's malicious father. In his
masterful and compassionate new novel, Kings of the Earth, Clinch
borrows again, this time from a true-life case of possible fratricide
in 1990. Three elderly, semiliterate brothers live in squalor on a
ramshackle dairy farm in central New York state. They barely wash, their
coveralls are splattered in cow manure, and their tiny house is a fetid
mess. Strangest of all, they share a bed—and on a summer night one dies
from what the local medical examiner calls strangulation. The prismatic
narrative shifts time and point of view, and Clinch easily slips into
the voices of his diverse cast of characters—a nosy, good-hearted
neighbor, a police investigator struggling to do the right thing, and
the brothers' drug-dealing nephew. Through evocative descriptions of the
rural landscape—"a countryside full of that same old homegrown
desolation"—and by imbuing these odd men with a gentle nobility and an
"antique strangeness," Clinch has created a haunting, suspenseful story.
— Taylor Antrim
Published 06/17/2011