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by Louise Doughty
From the author of Apple Tree Yard, a masterful thriller about espionage, love, and redemption.
John Harper is in hiding in a remote hut on a tropical island. As he lies awake at night, listening to the rain on the roof, he believes his life may be in danger. But he is less afraid of what is going to happen than of what he's already done.
In a local town, he meets Rita, a woman with her own tragic history. They begin an affair, but can they offer each other redemption? Or do the ghosts of the past always catch up with us in the end?
Moving between Europe during the Cold War, Civil Rights–era California, and Indonesia during the massacres of 1965 and the subsequent military dictatorship, Black Water explores some of the darkest events of recent history through the story of one troubled man.
In this gripping follow-up to Apple Tree Yard, Louise Doughty writes with the intelligence, vivid characterization, and moral ambiguity that make her fiction resonate in the reader's mind long after the final page.
"Starred Review. Powerful, probing fiction in the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carré." - Kirkus
"The ambitious plot moves awkwardly from the Cold War in Europe to the Civil Rights struggle in California and back to Indonesia. Yet the different elements never fully connect, the dense prose reading more like a newspaper investigation than fiction. Although tormented by his immoral choices, Harper elicits little sympathy from the reader, except during flashbacks to his childhood in L.A." - Publishers Weekly
"A tense, contemplative literary thriller and worthy follow-up to Doughty's critically acclaimed Apple Tree Yard (2013)." - Booklist
This information about Black Water was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Louise Doughty is the author of seven previous novels, including Apple Tree Yard, which was a top-ten bestseller in the U.K. and Ireland and has been published or is being translated into twenty-two languages. It was long-listed for The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize and short-listed for the CWA Steel Dagger Award and the National Book Awards Crime/Thriller of the Year
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