A New Voice for Western Literature

books:


	• A Sudden Country: A Novel Karen Fisher Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fisher writes like Seurat painted

I just finished A Sudden Country and found it to be absolutely extraordinary. It was so richly detailed I swear the author must have been there herself, struggling westward along the Oregon Trail in 1847. How else could anyone know these things?

The writing is superb, though complex and impressionistic. To me, Fisher's book is like a Seurat painting; each sentence a brilliant dot of color and light, layered upon the pages by the thousands until a story takes shape that is at once dreamy and impressionistic yet viscerally authentic. I haven't savored a book this much since The English Patient.

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Savor this Book

Most times, I devour books. With so little free time and even less patience, I read as though the book were a Thanksgiving meal: the table set, the guests seated, the dishes that required hours to prepare, consumed in mere minutes. That is the expectation; that is the result.
Not so with Karen Fisher's A Sudden Country. No, this is a novel to be savored.
I found myself putting it down after several pages, careful to conserve the gorgeous phrasing that made me wonder how long; was it a day, a week for Ms. Fisher to compose that sentence? It isn't often a writer is able to blend a satisfying story with such sumptuous writing, but she does.
Last night, I reached the climax. I stopped, counted forty pages, and considered putting it down. Oh, how I wish I had. Now I'm left hungry, knowing it will be some time before Karen Fisher prepares another book. So, until then, I'm left remembering.

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A book you won't soon forget.

This is a spare, brutal, wonderful book. I feel privileged that Karen Fisher shared this story with the rest of us.

A New Voice for Western Literature

Karen Fisher's novel took me a bit to get into. But once I caught on to the stark poetic style inspired by frontier journal entries and Karen's imagination and finely honed writing skills, I was thoroughly hooked. I took the book outside at night, fastened a flashlight on my head and read for hours in my outdoor bed, living in that not-so-long-ago world of our western ancestors.
Unique, I think, is the way in which this author thoroughly explores the issues of desire, loss and sexuality in the "wild" but repressive West. She paints a stark, compelling, realistic picture of how it really might have been to find yourself ripped from a settled home life and set on the trail west, with few material comforts and months of slow travel before arriving at an unknown and dangerous destination with a group of fellow travellers of various and motley dispositions.
I was not ready for it to end, but when it did, I felt the satisfaction of having experienced an exceptional work of literary genius. I hope Ms. Fisher doesn't have to wait very long before it strikes again.

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Intense Encounter

A Sudden Country is a sweeping chronicle of the 1847 journey of a group of pioneers from the midwest to the west coast. Karen Fisher's first published novel (Random House, 2005) is both an authentic and fictional story that focuses on two people, Lucy and James, the choices they make, their dilemmas as a result of their choices, and their learnings about forgiveness both of themselves and others. From the first page forward, you are dropped into a world that grabs ahold of you and brings you along with an intensity that doesn't quit. A continually intense encounter.
The style is a blend of lyrical and terse prose. Fisher's description of James'death is eloquently and evocatively done, worth repeaded readings--even aloud.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6

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