Crow Lake

Description: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The stellar debut novel from Mary Lawson (A Town Called Solace)--a shimmering tale of love, death and redemption set in a rural northern community where time stands still

A gorgeous, slow-burning story of family love and misunderstandings, of resentments harbored and driven underground. Set in the rough-hewn heart of the Canadian Shield, Crow Lake brings us into the fold of the Morrison family--four suddenly orphaned children bound close by loss. Young Kate Morrison worships her elder brother, Matt, whose passionate interest in the natural world consoles and inspires her. But as an adult, she feels estranged from her siblings--Matt, Luke, and the irrepressible Bo--who once composed her entire world, and she can't reconcile the heroic brother of her youth with the all-too-human individual he has become.

Mary Lawson pays out their gripping, emotionally and morally subtle story with heartbreaking humor and consummate control, overturning one's expectations to the end.

"I've been trying to tell everyone I know about Mary Lawson. . . . Each one of her novels is just a marvel." --Anne Tyler, bestselling author of Three Days in June

Review Quotes: "Critics are raving about . . . Crow Lake, a tightly plotted page-turner about sibling love, murder, and invertebrate zoology in rural Ontario, set in the 1950s and '60s." --The Toronto Star

"Deep, clear and teeming with life. A lot of readers are going to surrender themselves to the magic of Crow Lake. . . . This is the real thing." --The Globe and Mail

"The assurance with which Mary Lawson handles both reflection and violence makes her a writer to read and watch. . . . Peripheral portraits are skillfully drawn. Pot-banging Bo, with her minimal vocabulary of mostly shouted words, speaks to the heart without a scrap of sentimentality. The combative Cranes, unusual among fictional academics, are funny without being ridiculous and square off over the tablecloth with intelligence intact. . . . Most impressive are the nuanced and un-self-conscious zoological metaphors that thread through the text." --The New York Times

"The kind of book that keeps you reading well past midnight; you grieve when it's over. Then you start pressing it on friends." --The Washington Post

"Darkly unpredictable and compelling. . . . It is a wise book too, saying as much about how we deny our capacity to hurt as about how we deny our ability to help." --Financial Times

"Full of blossoming insights and emotional acuity. . . . A compelling and serious page-turner." --The Observer

"A compelling, slow-burning story of a fractured family in the rural 'badlands' of northern Ontario, where hardship is mirrored in the landscape and tragedy is never far away." --The Economist

"A tribute to the power of old-fashioned storytelling. . . . Lawson's narrative gift, voiced in quiet, unselfconscious prose that never distracts from the story, is immense." --Maclean's

"A touching meditation on the power of loyalty and loss, on the ways in which we pay our debts and settle old scores, and on what it means to love, to accept, to succeed--and to negotiate fate's obstacle courses." --People

"Crow Lake . . . is a spellbinding story . . . a marvelous story. . . . The bitter land and climate of Northern Ontario are like characters in this story of four orphaned children struggling to stay together as a family. . . . The language is subtle but beautiful. The reader is drawn into the lives of the characters. . . . The prospects for success are endless." --W.P. Kinsella, First Novels

"Crow Lake is a remarkable novel, utterly gripping and yet highly literate. I read it in a single sitting, then I read it again, just for pleasure. I await her next work with eagerness (and a little envy)." --Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat

"I didn't read Crow Lake so much as I fell in love with it. This is one beautiful book." --David Macfarlane, author of Summer Gone

"A finely crafted debut. . . . [Crow Lake] conveys an astonishing intensity of emotion, almost Proustian in its sense of loss and regret." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Lawson delivers a potent combination of powerful character writing and gorgeous description of the land. Her sense of pace and timing is impeccable throughout, and she uses dangerous winter weather brilliantly to increase the tension as the family battles to survive. This is a vibrant, resonant novel by a talented writer whose lyrical evocative writing invites comparisons to Rick Bass and Richard Ford." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Lawson achieves a breathless anticipatory quality in her surprisingly adept first novel, in which a child tells the story, but tells it very well indeed." --Booklist

"Every detail in this beautifully written novel rings true, the characters so solid we almost feel their flesh. Bo must be one of the most vividly realized infants in recent literature. Lawson creates a community without ever giving in to the Leacockian impulse to poke fun at small-town ways, instead showing respect to lives shaped by hard work and starved for physical comfort. The adult Kate's alienation from Crow Lake is initially difficult to accept, for everything in Kate's life, including her career in science, reflects the values of her formative years on the farm. Soon, though, her crippling guilt becomes the mystery that draws the reader on." --Quill & Quire (starred review)

"Lawson's narrative flows effortlessly in ever-increasing circles, swirling impressions in the reader's mind until form takes shape and the reader is left to reflect on the whole. Crow Lake is a wonderful achievement that will ripple in and out the reader's consciousness long after the last page is turned." --Amazon.co.uk

"Beautifully written, carefully balanced, Mary Lawson constructs a history of sacrifice, emotional isolation and family love without sounding a false note or a showy sentence." --Daily Mail (UK)

"Lawson's tight focus on the emotional and moral effects of a drastic turn of events on a small human group has its closest contemporary analogue in the novels of Ian McEwan." --Toronto Star

"Crow Lake mesmerizes. . . . Crow Lake may be one of the loveliest novels you almost ever read." --The Telegram

"Crow Lake [is] superb, elegant. . . . Lawson is a brilliant storyteller; she takes her time in laying the foundation of her tale and layering on the complexities. She's also an elegant stylist; her prose is lyrically thoughtful. . . . The depth, honesty and feeling throughout are superbly wrought. Crow Lake is a wondrous thing--it's a new Canadian classic." --The Hamilton Spectator

"Every so often, a novel is so beautifully structured and rivetingly told you want to collar everyone you see and tell them to read it. Mary Lawson's Crow Lake is just such a story." --Newark Star-Ledger