Mink River

Like Dylan Thomas Under Milk Wood and Sherwood Andersons Winesburg, Ohio, Brian Doyles stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people. In a small town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. Theres a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and theres an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what its thinking Its the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.