The Quick And The Dead - Tapa dura

Alice, Corvus and Annabel, each a motherless child, form an unlikely friendship. Alice is filled with convictions, Corvus with loss and Amabel with a worldly pragmatism. Thrown together one summer, they make their way through an air-conditioned landscape electric with signs and portents from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum and peopled by restless, disengaged adults. Joy Williams is one of America s finest and most original writers and, in this story of the life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the Texas desert, she has written her most eloquent novel. Both funny and serious, The Quick and the Dead, a strange panorama of contemporary life seen through the looking-glass of adolescence, explores the vagaries of love, our thirst for meaning and the peculiar paths by which we are all led to our destinies.

Alice, Corvus and Annabel, each a motherless child, form an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss and longing, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they explore an air-conditioned landscape emptied of nature yet electric with signs and portents.