Author:Sam Shepard
In these seventeen stories, Sam Shepard taps the same wellspring that has made him one of America's most acclaimed playwrights: sex and regret; the yearning for a frontier that has been subdivided out of existence; the anxious gulf that separates men and women; the even deeper gulf that separates men from their true selves. A fascinated boy watches the grim contest between a 'remedy man' - a fixer of bad horses - and a spectacularly bad-tempered stallion, a contest that mirrors the boy's own struggle with his father. A woman driving her mother's ashes back east for burial has an oracular run-in with an injured hawk. Two old men, who have lived together companionably since their wives died or left them and their children scattered to 'silicon computer hell', are brought to grief by a waitress at the local Denny's. Filled with cruelty, sorrow and flinty humour, Great Dream of Heaven is Shepard at his best, exercising his gifts for diamond-sharp physical description and effortless dialogue in stories that recall the themes he has explored with such ferocity and lyricism in his work for the theatre.
By turns nauseating, darkly funny and brutally graphic
—— ObserverA triumph... A novel of exceptional originality... Wonderful... A remarkable book, the most original work of fiction this year
—— GuardianAn immensely skilful writer
—— Daily TelegraphDeeply satirical, brutal and provocative, Haunted is harshly compulsive, eye-bleeding stuff
—— I-DI laughed until my ribs ached
—— Simon Shaw , Daily MailOne of the most popular novelists in the world...his fiction hits a nerve... Haunted breaks new ground
—— ObserverTóibín's deceptively straightforward style continues to manage somehow to encompass both lucidity and ambiguity, precision and poetry
—— Irish TimesExquisite
—— Metro, Fiction of the WeekThese stories are always intensely interesting and sometimes profoundly provocative
—— Irish IndependentPerfect; and as good as the best of William Trevor, than which there can be no higher praise
—— ScotsmanA blinding display of mischievous wit and excruciating humour
—— UncutOne of the greatest short story writers alive
—— Ben Rice