The Maid's Version
On sale
5th June 2014
Price: £9.99
Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction, 2014
In 1929, an explosion in a Missouri dance hall killed forty-two people. Who was to blame? Mobsters from St Louis? Embittered gypsies? The preacher who cursed the waltzing couples for their sins? Or could it just have been a colossal accident?
Alma Dunahew, whose scandalous younger sister was among the dead, believes the answer lies in a dangerous love affair, but no one will listen to a maid from the wrong side of the tracks. It is only decades later that her grandson hears her version of events – and must decide if it is the right one.
Alma Dunahew, whose scandalous younger sister was among the dead, believes the answer lies in a dangerous love affair, but no one will listen to a maid from the wrong side of the tracks. It is only decades later that her grandson hears her version of events – and must decide if it is the right one.
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Reviews
Daniel Woodrell is the American writer we increasingly look to for the latest urgent news on the American soul. The Maid's Version is a beautiful engine of a novel, whose cogs were not entirely made by human agency, one might hazard to say.
The Maid's Version is stunning. Daniel Woodrell writes flowing, cataclysmic prose with the irresistible aura of fate about it.
Under the grisly, seductive, colloquial tone is a very unusual thing - a communitarian novel: a novel concerned with how we live - and sometimes die - together, how we share experiences through the rituals of speaking and writing, because that is the fundamental spirit and purpose of language.
Blends the folkloric with Southern gothic, historical recapitulation with fictional investigative journalism, all suffused in his matchless tenderness of feeling
Woodrell's unique prose - laconic and yet possessed of an offbeat lyricism all its own - is well suited to a story reminiscent of a folk tale passed down through the generations.
A captivating, almost operatic narrative of how tragedy and grief can transform places and people . . . a stunning story of one small town, and all of its profound complexities and opaque mysteries.
Woodrell's distinctive qualities are his very puckish humour and the way he drapes extravagantly writerly prose on the bones of a ferociously exciting whodunit
Woodrell's majestic gifts create an unforgettable impression of one woman's life played out against a horrific crime that was never solved but remained to haunt all involved.
Set in a small town festering with anger and ancient slights, it is an eerie, wondrous elegy. Daniel Woodrell understands the essential menace residing deep within human nature and although only 164 pages this is indeed a huge book