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    Into That Darkness: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Into That Darkness: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Into That Darkness: A Novel
    Ebook315 pages3 hours

    Into That Darkness: A Novel

    By Steven Price

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Acclaimed Canadian poet Steven Price has conjured a stunning debut novel that explores what we ask from each other, and how much we are prepared to give.

    Set in the city of Victoria, British Columbia, Into That Darkness opens at the moment when a massive earthquake hits the entire west coast with devastating results. Amid the destruction of the city, survivors are left to negotiate a calamity in which bonds of civility are pushed to their limits and often broken.

    When Arthur Lear hears a voice crying in the rubble, he finds himself descending deep under a collapsed building in a desperate attempt to save a young boy and his mother. But what he discovers there will change him forever — as circumstances lead him across the city’s broken landscape, through the chaos of its hospitals and streets, in a harrowing search for the mother’s lost daughter. Over the days that follow, Lear’s very sense of humanness will be tested and compromised, as he faces the limits of himself and his fellow survivors, in his long journey home.

    A novel for our age of anxiety and fear, Steven Price delivers a powerful story about the physical manifestation of the darker things lurking in our culture, in ourselves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateMar 12, 2011
    ISBN9780887629570
    Unavailable
    Into That Darkness: A Novel
    Author

    Steven Price

    Steven Price’s previous novel, By Gaslight, was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger, longlisted for the Giller Prize, and named a Book of the Year by NPR, CBC, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. He is the award-winning author of one other novel, Into that Darkness, and two collections of poetry. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with his family.

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    Reviews for Into That Darkness

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    • 5/5
      Set in our current time lines, this story starts out as any ordinary day. 68 year old Arthur Lear makes a trip into town to visit a coffee shop and his favorite tobacconist. At the coffee shop, the shop owner Anna Mercia serves customers while keeping an eye on her 10-year old son Mason who is supposed to be working through math problems at a table in the shop. It is a school day and while Mason is in the shop instead of joining his classmates for a field trip to the local museum, Anna's older daughter Kat is at her school. Against this backdrop of normalcy, a massive earthquake hits the region, with devastating results. Covering a period of five days, the reader steps into a world where suddenly the only help immediately at hand is the help of fellow survivors. Survival instincts take hold - both altruistic, in coming to the aid of total strangers and more sinister in nature - and builds with the shock, fear, the lack of trust, and the desperate search for missing persons.I was literally blown away by this one. The overall writing style and Price's tenacious grip on the reader was reminiscent of my experience while reading Jose Saramago's Blindness last year, another novel that I highly recommend. With a perfect balance of nail-biting tension, descriptive prose and moments for reflective thoughts from the characters, I found this to be a vivid, and haunting accurate portrayal of the scramble for survival in the aftermaths of massive devastation. Not only is Price able to capture the scenery and the devastation with sharp effect - loved the description of the earthquake as it hit - he has also crafted complex characters that shift before the reader as they try to adapt to the alien environment they now find themselves in. The icing on the cake for me is that this novel is set in my hometown. For the average reader with no understanding of the city, this story will still come across as an apocalyptic set in "any town". For people with a local understanding, the subtle local references that were scattered throughout the story were great 'extras' to an already great story for me.Overall, my favorite story so far this year, hands down.