The Black Snow: A Novel

by Paul Lynch Narrated by John Keating

Overview

The startling novel from a brilliant young Irish novelist on the rise, who "has a sensational gift for a sentence" (Colum McCann on Red Sky in Morning).

In Donegal in the spring of 1945, a farmhand runs into a burning barn and does not come out alive. The farm's owner, Barnabas Kane, can only look on as his friend dies and all 43 of his cattle are destroyed in the blaze. Following the disaster, the bull-headed and proudly self-sufficient Barnabas is forced to reach out to the community for assistance.

But resentment simmers over the farmhand's death, and Barnabas and his family begin to believe their efforts at recovery are being sabotaged. Barnabas is determined to hold firm. Yet his teenage son struggles under the weight of a terrible secret, and his wife is suffocated by the uncertainty surrounding their future. As Barnabas fights ever harder for what is rightfully his, his loved ones are drawn ever closer to a fate that should never have been theirs. In The Black Snow, Paul Lynch takes the pastoral novel and -- with the calmest of hands -- tears it apart. With beautiful, haunting prose, Lynch illuminates what it means to live through crisis, and puts to the test our deepest certainties about humankind.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

03/09/2015
Lynch returns to rural Donegal, the setting for his debut, Red Sky at Morning, in this stark tale of tragic consequences. Farmer Barnabas Kane, his teenaged son, Billy, and farmhand Matthew Peeples are working in the fields when the byre that houses the farm’s cattle begins to burn. Barnabas urges Peeples into the blaze before entering it himself, and neither the farmhand nor the cattle survive. As the community and Barnabas himself question his role in Peeples’s death, the Kane family’s life seems to disintegrate. Barnabas cannot rebuild the byre, having let the insurance lapse, and he refuses to sell land to raise the money despite his financial desperation. Insisting the fire was deliberately set, the once-valiant farmer spirals into depression, drink, and a combativeness that isolates the family further. His wife, Eskra, battles to preserve her faith in her husband and the farm, while Billy—whose journals punctuate the omniscient narration—struggles alone with adolescent growing pains and a searing sense of responsibility. Details reference World War II, but Lynch’s beautifully intertwined emotional and physical landscapes have a timelessness. Unconventional, sometimes confusing syntax, as well as the novel’s patient setup, make for a slow start. But the story gathers momentum scene by scene, building to a convincing finish. (May)

From the Publisher

"A novel in which sentence after sentence comes so beautifully alive in all the fullness of its diction and meaning that most other contemporary Irish fiction looks sheepish by comparison. Lynch's language is rough-hewn and yet beautifully lyrical....I could scarcely read more than a few pages at a time without having to stop and contemplate quitting the writing of fiction myself."
—Alan Cheuse, NPR

"The Black Snow is a staggeringly beautiful book. Immensely powerful, but subtly so. I was mesmerized by it. I read it in one go, but I'll go back to it for sure."
—Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds and Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

"A brilliant, hypnotic book. You will lose yourself in the sounds and rhythms-Lynch makes the page sing like the old masters."
—Philipp Meyer, author of The Son

"A stunning tale of retribution and disintegration.... at once so starkly brutal and so beautiful that it is impossible to look away."
-Booklist

"A haunting novel from a writer with a gift for language and character.... Lynch has a Seamus Heaney ear for the sights and sounds of rural life." —Kirkus Reviews

"Lynch establishes himself as one of his generation's very finest novelists. The Black Snow is a dark, mesmerizing study in obsession, despair, and secrets too long held."
—Ron Rash, author of The Cove

"Lynch's beautifully intertwined emotional and physical landscapes have a timelessness.... The story gathers momentum scene by scene."
—Publishers Weekly

"Some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read. Vivid, unsettling and intensely enjoyable."—Donal Ryan, Booker-nominated author of The Spinning Heart

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2015-02-17
Life turns brutally cruel for a farming family of three in 1940s Ireland in this sad, haunting novel from a writer with a gift for language and character. "It was the beginning of darkness" are the opening words, a telling phrase that also tells the time of day when Barnabas Kane and his hired hand, Matthew Peoples, rush from their fields at the signs of a fire. The building housing 43 cows is ablaze; Matthew would never have entered without the hand of Barnabas pushing him. So begins to swirl a maelstrom of unrelenting misfortune for the family Kane, the name echoing the Bible's first murderer. The family has scant capital and no insurance coming because Barnabas canceled it in a prideful moment. Seeking help among the community, he encounters suspicion that he had a hand in Matthew's death as well as the perverse rejection of anyone not born in and unmoved from the area (Barnabas is local but spent some years in New York before returning). Having done something sinful, Billy Kane, 14, fears he may have indirectly caused the fire to be set. Whether it was arson and who struck the match provide one thread of suspense. The other arises, as it can in the book of Job, from wondering what in God's name the devil will come up with next. Even Eskra Kane's bees are victims of slaughtering wasps that then assail her body and unhinge her mind. An accidental death also propelled Lynch's first novel (Red Sky in Morning, 2013, etc.), a blunter retribution tale that calls to mind the stark cruelty of Cormac McCarthy. With his second novel, Lynch has a Seamus Heaney ear for the sights and sounds of rural life, making his prose thick and jagged, sometimes ponderous and often evocative. Lynch evokes so many shades of guilt, pride, innocence, righteousness, and punishment that the book might help found a religion or maybe restore one's faith in a deity that could make a fine writer with one hand even if he unmade the Kanes with the other.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173743459
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	05/12/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

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