Nightwoods - Charles Frazier

Written by Charles Frazier
Read by Will Patton
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: September 27, 2011
Duration: 08:46:29

Charles Frazier puts his remarkable gifts in the service of a lean, taut narrative while losing none of the transcendent prose, storytelling, and insight into human nature that have made him one of the most beloved and celebrated authors in the world. Now, with his brilliant portrait of Luce, a young woman who inherits her murdered sister’s troubled twins, Frazier has created his most memorable heroine.

Before the children, Luce was content with the reimbursements of the rich Appalachian landscape, choosing to live apart from the small community around her. But the coming of the children changes everything, cracking open her solitary life in difficult, hopeful, dangerous ways.

A mother who is brutally murdered leaves her two children to her sister, setting up a violent confrontation with the children’s father. Narrator Will Patton continues to prove himself miles ahead of the pack when it comes to portraying Southern lowlifes involved in high drama. Frazier describes the people and places of backwater North Carolina in the early 1960s with surgical precision, while Patton fills his delivery with pregnant pauses and a breathtaking pacing that transmits urgency and sadness. Patton performs these quirky characters on a collision course that is both spine-tingling and, at times, humorous. Frazier continues to produce work that is worthy of praise.

Another reviewer wrote…. Frazier’s characters lack nuance (they are either very, very good or very, very bad) and his prose is often self-consciously folksy. But his great strength, as well as presenting us with a fully realized physical backdrop, is the tenderness with which he renders the relationships at the core of this book, creating a compelling meditation on violence and the possibility that human love can heal even the deepest wound