Halibut on the Moon
‘What endures the most from this novel is the sense of desperation that emerges from its central character—a feeling that’s at once profoundly alienated from everything and everyone around it and heartbreakingly tactile. A moving portrait of a family dealing with loss before it happens and of the harrowing ways depression can disrupt countless lives.’ Kirkus Reviews
Bright Air Black
‘Ambitious, dazzling, disturbing and memorable.’ Financial Times
‘A compelling study of human nature stripped to its most elemental.’ Guardian
‘Vann gives us a fresh slant on an early myth, an up-close and in-depth character study. From the outset his drama unfolds in prose that is both atmospheric and electrifying…[A] stunning depiction of one of mythology’s most complex characters.’ Australian
‘[Vann’s] genius lies in his ability to blow away all the elegance and toga-clad politeness that have grown like a crust around our idea of ancient Greece and to reveal the bare bones of the Archaic period in all their bloody, reeking nastiness.’ The Times
‘Vann’s prose conveys with striking immediacy a world where the real and the phantasmagorical, the human and the divine, are intricately entwined…His evocation of a barbaric world lingers long in the reader’s imagination.’ Canberra Times
‘Vann’s treatment has all the gore and poetry of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.’ Saturday Paper
‘This novel is arguably Vann’s brightest…Vann’s trademark limpid prose enables us to observe far more of what lies beneath.’ Australian
‘Elegantly written and fiercely imagined…At times, this is a painful novel, but its beauty propels it toward redemption.’ Chicago Tribune
‘Aquarium virtually blends light, plunging the reader into the relentless darkness of tormented souls in a splintered family… His language hits the reader like shrapnel in a metalworker’s studio—fragmented and sharp-fitting for novels so packed with shattering turns.’ Seattle Times
‘Cinematic…Aquarium is a genuine departure for Vann, an authentically new direction…It leaves more air and space for the reader, it dwells less on physical mechanics, and it has a softer touch.’ New York Times Book Review
‘Aquarium is as rich as good poetry and as addictive as a first-class detective novel.’ Spectator
‘A triumph.’ Daily Mail
‘Vann’s work has a spare, parable-like quality…[He] writes with deft control and a gift for prose propelled as effortlessly as a school of fish.’ Financial Times
‘Vann’s provocative prose is filled with a sense of wonder and beauty, even when the lives he describes are tragic.’ LA Times
‘David Vann is surely one of the most powerful writers working today.’ New Zealand Herald
Goat Mountain
‘A provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions. Vann writes with grace and intensity.’ Daily Telegraph
‘This story has the power of a bullet fired from a gun.’ Economist
‘Muscular, existential, barbaric and dense with allegory… [Vann] is doing something fearless with allegory and character, building a soulless narrator to represent our true nature: primal, instinctual, unapologetic.’ Washington Post
‘Brilliant and wise.’ The Times
‘For all its unyielding darkness, Goat Mountain is, perhaps perversely, an exhilarating experience. It is, first of all, cathartic in the way of all good tragedies. But it is also exhilarating for the least perverse of reasons: the experience of reading a novelist of David Vann’s rare artistry and vision.’ Observer
Dirt
‘Searing…Vann has an extravagantly literary sensibility, and his novel is full of echoes: One thinks of the stately inevitability of classical tragedy, of Chekhov’s lost souls, of the hallucinatory quality of Faulkner’s rural fantasia, and of Stephen King’s depictions of an unraveling mind.’ Washington Post Book World
‘[Vann] is the real thing—a mature, risk-taking and fantastically adept fiction writer who dares to go to the darkest places, explore their most appalling corners.’ Observer
‘Vann is a brave writer, daring to write about and depict things that most other authors would baulk at, but that’s what makes him so good—that unflinching eye for the darkness you could potentially find in any of us, given the wrong chain of events.’ Independent
‘His language is sharply funny, even as his characters enact a tragedy of Greek proportions.’ New Yorker
‘This is a novel of violence, destruction and ruin. There is no salvation. And yet Mr Vann’s soaring writing carries it forward—a reminder of the beauty that can grace even the beastliest things.’ Economist
‘Brave and brilliant…Dirt is showing us something unexpected, and unexpectedly stunning…Vann’s details here, as always, are pitch-perfect.’ San Francisco Chronicle