Shot-Blue book cover by Jesse Ruddock
$17.95

Shot-Blue

Brand: Coach House Books
Current Stock: 1
UPC: 9781552453407
Gift Wrapping: Gift Wrapping Available
Author: Jesse Ruddock
  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Coach House Books; 1st Edition edition (April 2, 2017)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1552453405
  • ISBN-13: 978-1552453407
  • Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches

‘Shot-Blue is that rarest species, a genuinely wise novel.’ – Rivka Galchen

Rachel is a young single mother living with her son, Tristan, on a lake that borders the unchannelled north – remote, nearly inhospitable. She does what she has to do to keep them alive. But soon, and unexpectedly, Tristan will have to live alone, his youth unprotected and rough. The wild, open place that is all he knows will be overrun by strangers – strangers inhabiting the lodge that has replaced his home, strangers who make him fight, talk, and even love, when he doesn't want to. Ravenous and unrelenting, Shot-Blue is a book of first love and first loss.

Reviews

‘This poetically written book is full of riddles, of characters talking past each other and misunderstanding one another in the vein of a Shakespearean love tangle. Loneliness, the very human inability to communicate with one another in a way that reveals our deepest selves, is the point. The novel is a fine corrective to fiction that assumes that people are rational actors and that motive is straightforward or even discernible.’
— Publishers Weekly

‘A moving, lyrical novel. [...] A searing debut.’
— Kirkus Reviews

‘Shot-Blue is that rarest species, a genuinely wise novel. Its characters are at once too lonely, and insufficiently alone; their landscape feels both tender and indifferent, god-haunted and abandoned. This is a truly exceptional and compelling work, and in that way, its own variety of joy.’
— Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

‘Jesse Ruddock understands the weight of things that cannot be said aloud. A sensitive book about lives lived at the edge of society, in the shadow of an idyllic panorama, given voice only in the silence of adolescence.’
— Jenny Erpenbeck, author of The End of Days

‘Stunning and just so gracefully told. Ruddock’s landscape and characters are told by heart and her fierce and beautiful language makes you feel it.’
— Naja Marie Aidt, author of Rock, Paper, Scissors

‘ The author is talented, with a penchant for paradox and a yen for examining the backward logic that guides our daily anxieties.’
— Quill & Quire

Author

Born in Guelph and based in New York, Jesse Ruddock first left Canada on a hockey scholarship to Harvard. Her writing and photographs have appeared in the NewYorker.com, BOMB Magazine, Music & Literature, and Vice. Shot-Blue is her first novel.

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