The Raven - Tapa blanda

‘Ever since Melville’s assault on the great white whale (and with it the Great American novel) the sea off the New England Coast has proved as fruitful to writers as to fishermen. The latest to launch into it is Peter Landesman, whose immensely accomplished first novel offers a fictional account of a real life disaster, the sinking of the pleasure boat, the Raven, in 1941.
Out of the bare bones of this story, Landesman has fashioned a fascinating fiction. Narrative is skilfully handled across four decades as the tragedy take its long-term toll and the sea gradually reveals its secrets.
This is a magnificent debut. Landesman is the equal of E. Annie Proulx in his handling of the fishermen’s hard lives and tangy dialogue. The Raven displays the allegorical power of the best sea stories wedded to the thematic richness and psycholgical depth of the finest fiction.’
Michael Arditti, The Times

Move over Peter Høeg and David Guterson! From a multi-talented new writer comes a remarkably potent, haunting and totally compelling debut novel – a beguiling literary, sea mystery.

On 29 June, 1941, thirty-six members of a small community near Boston go out on a picnic off Bailey Island on the pleasure craft, the Raven. Mysteriously, only the women and one man, the captain, naked and tied to a keg, come back – dead, found by a lone lobsterman and his nine-year-old son. Then nothing – no other bodies and no trace of the vessel are ever discovered. Conflicting details about the boat’s disappearance abound. Was there fog, or was the weather clear? Was it sunk by the Germans, or scuttled for insurance money? Was a bad sea at fault, or a bad captain?