The Black Snow
Author of the 2023 Booker Prize-Winning novel Prophet Song
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In the spring of 1945, farm-worker Matthew Peoples runs into a burning byre and does not come out alive. The farm's owner, Barnabas Kane, can only look on as his friend dies and all 43 of his cattle are destroyed in the blaze.
Following the disaster, the bull-headed and proudly self-sufficient Barnabas is forced to reach out to the farming community for assistance. But resentment simmers over Matthew Peoples' death, and Barnabas and his family begin to believe their efforts at recovery are being sabotaged.
Barnabas is determined to hold firm. Yet his son Billy struggles under the weight of a terrible secret, and his wife Eskra is suffocated by the uncertainty surrounding their future. And as Barnabas fights ever harder for what is rightfully his, his loved ones are drawn ever closer to a fate that should never have been theirs.
In The Black Snow, Paul Lynch takes the pastoral novel and - with the calmest of hands - tears it apart. With beautiful, haunting prose, Lynch illuminates what it means to be alive during crisis, and puts to the test our deepest certainties about humankind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lynch returns to rural Donegal, the setting for his debut, Red Sky at Morning, in this stark tale of tragic consequences. Farmer Barnabas Kane, his teenaged son, Billy, and farmhand Matthew Peeples are working in the fields when the byre that houses the farm's cattle begins to burn. Barnabas urges Peeples into the blaze before entering it himself, and neither the farmhand nor the cattle survive. As the community and Barnabas himself question his role in Peeples's death, the Kane family's life seems to disintegrate. Barnabas cannot rebuild the byre, having let the insurance lapse, and he refuses to sell land to raise the money despite his financial desperation. Insisting the fire was deliberately set, the once-valiant farmer spirals into depression, drink, and a combativeness that isolates the family further. His wife, Eskra, battles to preserve her faith in her husband and the farm, while Billy whose journals punctuate the omniscient narration struggles alone with adolescent growing pains and a searing sense of responsibility. Details reference World War II, but Lynch's beautifully intertwined emotional and physical landscapes have a timelessness. Unconventional, sometimes confusing syntax, as well as the novel's patient setup, make for a slow start. But the story gathers momentum scene by scene, building to a convincing finish.
