The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

A Mile Down

Internationally bestselling author David Vann tells the true story of building his own sailing ship and of the disastrous voyage that ensues in this inspirational memoir of discovery and reconciliation.

You gaze entranced as his destiny unfolds…Vann pulls off the most gripping passage of sea-catastrophe writing I have read outside Conrad, a chest-tightening, concretely detailed, cold, sickening and cumulatively desperate depiction of life turning murderous.

At once memoir, confession, travel book and thriller, David Vann’s A Mile Down is so vivid and intense you will dread to see it end…. The book is a testimony of passion and courage in deadly storms and scarier calms, of a man wrestling with his ghosts and gifts in the very shadow of paradise.

Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Brave Enemies

Vann brings his undoubted storytelling skill to his own experiences…unflinching honesty…a terrific piece of writing from a brave and talented author.

An antidote to the usual run of escape-to-the-sun memoirs.

Rarely has a memoir combined such raw self-exposure with such ultimately consoling insight.

David Vann was born in the Aleutian Islands and spent his childhood in Ketchikan, Alaska. He is the author of the international bestseller Legend of a Suicide – which has been translated into eighteen languages and won several prizes including the Prix Medicis Etranger – Caribou Island, Dirt, Goat Mountain and Aquarium. He is also the author of two bestselling non-fiction books, and has written for Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, the Sunday Times, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and other magazines and newspapers.

David Vann has loved boats all his life. So when his academic career seems to be stuck in the doldrums, he leaps at the opportunity to start an educational charter business, teaching creative writing workshops aboard a sailboat. But a trip to Turkey seems him dreaming bigger - and before he knows it, he is at the helm of his own ninety-foot boat, running charters along the Turkish coast. 
 
And here his troubles begin. Sinking deep into debt, and encountering everything from a lost rudder to freak storms, Vann is on the verge of losing everything - including his life. 
 
Part high-seas adventure, part journey of self-discovery, A Mile Down is a gripping and unforgettable story of struggle and redemption, by a writer at the top of his game.

Aquarium

A lyrical and moving new novel from the author of Legend of a Suicide

His prose is as clear, fresh and invigorating as a starry winter night on an Aleutian mountainside, and his intriguing scenarios make his books easy to devour in a few urgent sittings

A stirring tale that isn’t as simple as it first appears.

A blue-collar parable … [The character] looks back on her life as a child looks into a tank, hoping to make sense of the world inside – a theme that Vann develops beautifully, creating a mysterious realm of the wintry American city’

Vann spins a powerful tale of guilt and resentment, steeped in the atmosphere of a bleak winter city

Brilliant … Aquarium is as rich as good poetry and as addictive as a first-class detective novel

Strangely beguiling … [Vann’s] writing echoes Faulkner’s in its feeling for the means by which children might uncannily echo their parents … he is responding to a genuine tendency that many children have, to shape the calls and responses and perceptions and stories according to their favourite animals … Aquarium offers a new direction for Vann’s writing, in which his characteristically unsparing eye for cruelty begins to consort with more lyrical voices.

A genuine departure for Vann, an authentically new direction … Its delicate, coming-of-age sensuality and bright saltwater menagerie … leaves more air and space for the reader … and it has a softer touch.

Aquarium may be elegantly written and fiercely imagined, but it is also a beautiful book

He is expert at showing the way that damaged, screwed-up adults inflict harm on children

A kind of modern fairy tale, one laced with treachery and trials and the greatest demon of all to battle, the past ... Vann’s novels are striking, uncompromising portraits of American life; here is another exceptional example.

By pulling no punches in this explicit exploration of family, forgiveness, duty, acceptance, parent-child relationships, and what constitutes abuse, Vann has outdone himself.

A 12-year-old’s fragile world, mesmerizing innocence, and emerging adolescence are the heart of this alluring novel … Her fresh voice rings true … Since electrifying the literary world five years ago with his debut novel, Legend of a Suicide, Vann has racked up an astonishing number of international awards. This lovely, wrenching novel should add to that list.

Vann’s deceptively simple style conceals the story’s raw emotional power.

'Startlingly brilliant' Spectator 
 
'A triumph' Daily Mail 
 
'One of America's most powerful writers' Times Literary Supplement 
 
Twelve-year-old Caitlin lives alone with her mother - a docker at the local container port - in subsidised housing next to an airport in Seattle. Each day, while she waits to be picked up after school, Caitlin visits the local aquarium to study the fish. Gazing at the creatures within the watery depths, Caitlin is transported to a shimmering universe beyond her own. 
 
When she befriends an old man at the tanks one day, who seems as enamoured by the fish as she, Caitlin cracks open a dark family secret and propels her once-blissful relationship with her mother towards a precipice of terrifying consequence.

Goat Mountain

A shocking, suspenseful and daring new novel from one of the greatest American writers at work today, whose previous books include Caribou Island, Dirt and Legend of a Suicide.

Part of the experience of reading Vann (over time across his oeuvre, and within individual books) is a kind of uneasy curiosity about just how dark he’s going to get and where he’s going to go to find that darkness. This new excursion is as harrowing as anything he has written, as thrillingly desolate, in its way, as the traumatic hallucinations in Legend of a Suicide…One of the most intense and detailed examinations of an act of violence I have ever read in a work of fiction. Its unflinching realism eventually becomes a kind of nightmare surrealism. It is at once deeply disturbing and powerfully propulsive, a hallucinatory insight into what it means, and how it feels, to kill. The book is a vision of hell focused not on the supernatural, but on nature itself. Vann is a writer who hunts big game. He tracks the same wild territory as Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy – the violence and perversity at the root of what we call human nature, the animal savagery that is our first inheritance…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.

The Cain imagery is powerful and the narrator’s psyche fascinating...Vann’s prose never lags. The novel is not just gripping: it tightens around its reader like a boa constrictor...Goat Mountain is a brilliant and wise interrogation of a world in which “We were always killing something, and it seemed we were put here to kill”.

Vann is a daring writer, as bold in his plot development as he is unflinching in his prose...Goat Mountain is a compelling and morally challenging novel by one of America’s most powerful writers.

Vann evokes the scrub, ridges and conifers of northern California with the meticulous eye of a great landscape artist...This story has genuine potency.

This is Vann’s fourth novel, and in that short time he’s mapped out a unique fictional territory, a rugged, literary landscape with debts to Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway but with an acuteness of eye that’s all the author’s own...Vann’s description of place and action is unsurpassed, a wonderful clarity to his prose, and the voice of his narrator is truly frightening as he tries to come to terms with what’s happened. The tension builds to an extraordinary and explosive climax among the heavily forested mountains, where everything that makes us who we are is called into question. Powerful and deep stuff.

The book has the quality of a ballad or a folk tale…Mr Vann’s work is death-haunted…[He] is so adept, in Goat Mountain, at conjuring a world where rationality has no place…This story has the power of a bullet fired from a gun.

[A] powerful tale of the complicated fragility of family ties…Internationally acclaimed and bestselling author David Vann convincingly conjures up the primeval atmosphere of the wilderness and the depth of the hunting instinct. The spirit of the Old Testament is never very far from his prose, and the story of Cain and Abel hovers over the boy’s sense of right and wrong. Tense and unsettling stuff, difficult to put down and disturbingly memorable.

This is a coming of age story as old as Goat Mountain itself and Vann’s descriptions of the Northern Californian landscape are beautiful and meticulously drawn... Vann’s prose has real pace and momentum and drama so intense that this reader often gasped out loud at the horror presented... This is a triumph of a novel. Please read it.

Vann’s writing is highly descriptive…a gripping read

The author has constructed a wide beautiful splendid vista tainted by a stream of flowing hot red blood with great sentences with a visceral and fluid prose ... David Vann has a prose and voice that the reader may know of, this novel comes to finalise in his dealings with death, loss, and sacrifice, this story marks a great point in his writing’s timeline. One cannot help but feel excited and expectantly wait upon his next novel, on what road he shall traverse and what characters he shall craft with great skill.

Vann’s writing is thoughtful and profound.

There's no doubt that this is a deeply disturbing and violent book — there's one particular scene involving a wounded buck that is stomach-churning — but this is a powerful read that deals with important subjects, not least at what point should a child take responsibility for his actions. It ruminates on the sanctity of life, the sins of the father, the rules (or ethics) of hunting, human guilt and remorse, crime and punishment….[It will] appeal to those who like dark suspenseful tales about moral culpability.

It’s an extraordinary achievement and a riveting work of prose

David Vann is an internationally bestselling author whose work has been translated into nineteen languages. He is the winner of fifteen prizes, including France’s Prix Médicis Étranger, Spain’s Premi Llibreter, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, the Grace Paley Prize, a California Book Award, the AWP Non-fiction Prize, and France’s L’Express Readers’ Prize. His books – Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, Dirt, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth – have appeared on seventy Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Wallace Stegner Fellow, John L'Heureux Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he is a professor at the University of Warwick and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comté, France. He has written for publications such as the Atlantic, Esquire, McSweeney's, Sunday Times, Observer, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, Elle and many others. He has also appeared in documentaries for the BBC, Nova, National Geographic, and CNN. 
 
www.davidvann.com

A shocking, suspenseful and daring new novel from one of the greatest American writers at work today, whose previous books include Caribou Island, Dirt and Legend of a Suicide. 
 
In David Vann’s searing novel Goat Mountain, an eleven-year-old boy is eager to make his first kill at his family’s annual deer hunt. But all is not as it should be. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably. 
 
Set over the course of one hot and hellish weekend, Goat Mountain is the story of a family struggling to contend with a terrible crime and its repercussions. David Vann creates a haunting and 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 – what we owe for what we’ve done.

Dirt

A devastating new novel from one of the most exciting and acclaimed American writers

Vann’s gift – his quest, almost – is a willingness to explore the unimaginable, the unthinkable, on the page. He is the real thing – a mature, risk-taking and fantastically adept fiction writer who dares go to the darkest places, explore their most appalling corners. I haven’t read a novel as rough and shocking or, importantly, as wise and warm as this one in a long time.

Vann’s rendering of the everyday gratings of family life is pitch-perfect ... A well-written, unflinching exploration of the often terrifying chasm between who we want to be, and who we actually are.

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 ... If you want the naked, awful truth, then dive in.

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.

Unputdownable, thundering at breathtaking speed towards the shocking climactic act. Brilliantly chilling.

The characters in Dirt read as archetypes, figures in a Beckett play …The last pages of Dirt are lit by a berserk energy. It’s as if Vann has pulled off the trick of putting us inside a Hitchcock maniac … When you finally put this book down, break the spell and walk away, you’re left with a deeper resonance, a lingering sadness.

Another dispatch from dysfunctional suburbia by one of the US’s hottest writers…A morbid fascination with the family’s eye-poppingly vicious interactions keeps you turning the pages…It’s hard to forget.

David Vann has a talent for being able to pack a lot into very few words - and to make them all effective and forceful. ...compelling. If I start reading Vann I know that I'm going to have to keep reading no matter how painful, how distressing the story...what marks this book out as being something special is the forensic examination of the tipping point at which a disturbed mind, an unfocused mind tumbles into madness.

A powerful story of a family on the verge of imploding, David Vann's novel might not be an easy read - but it is, undoubtedly, a book you will want to devour in a single sitting.

Dirt’s basic set-up , a lone parent and a child locked together in unhealthy co-dependency, is reminiscent of southern tales by Flannery O’Connor, John Kennedy Toole and Tennessee Williams. And while Galen’s religious obsessions align Dirt more with O’Connor or Toole, it’s Williams’s world that the novel is otherwise closest to: the unforgiving, brain-invading heat; the incessant family squabbling; the autocratic patriarch (dead, but still looming in this case); the over-devoted mother; the furtive, incest-like relationship; and the failed, trapped central character, nevertheless convinced of his special gifts and destiny.

What Vann does so well is to take recognisably ordinary characters and put them in critical situations, where tiny decisions or actions have life-altering outcomes. This is what gives his books their nightmarish quality -- the feeling that these events could happen to anyone.

I found it impossible to put down.  I read it over a couple of rushed afternoons and found myself gasping for air…Days later I still couldn’t get Galen’s voice – that distinctive blend of mocking, vulnerable and cruel – out of my head…It [Dirt] is both brilliant and painful; comic and disturbing; full of despair about humanity and moments of warmth; deranged and beautifully executed.

Vann's writing is vivid and shocking, and his imagination is extraordinary.

Vann presents us with a pitch perfect rendering of the everyday problems of family life, while simultaneously depicting an outlandish and  horrifying battle between son, mother and aunt.

David Vann was born in the Aleutian Islands and spent his childhood in Ketchikan, Alaska. His first book of fiction, the international bestseller Legend of a Suicide, has now been translated into seventeen languages and has won several prizes, including the Prix Medicis Etranger in France. His novel Caribou Island is an international bestseller. He is also the author of two bestselling non-fiction books, and has written for Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, the Sunday Times, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and other magazines and newspapers. A current Guggenheim fellow and former Wallace Stegner fellow, he is currently a professor at the University of San Francisco.

Twenty-two-year-old Galen is a New Age believer on a warpath towards transcendence. He lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded house, surviving on old family money that his Aunt Helen and cousin Jennifer are determined to get their hands on. Galen doesn’t know who his father is, his abusive grandfather is dead, and his grandmother is losing her memory. When the family takes a trip to an old cabin in the Sierras, tensions crescendo. Caught in a compromising position, Galen will discover the shocking truth of just how far he will go to attain what it is he craves.

Caribou Island

An extravagantly gifted and moving writer

Wields an unforgiving, elemental power that is breathtaking to read

Beautiful, richly atmospheric . . . deserves to consolidate Vann's position among America's literary high flyers

The prose here frequently achieves a quite astonishing beauty

A novel of fine artistry and stark emotional truth - full of our darkest currents and faintest sounds

Caribou Island is a scant 300 pages, and written in prose as pellucid as the rivers he used to fish as a boy. But it says so much: about men and women, about marriage, about the desperate gap between who we want to be and who we are

David Vann was born on Adak Island, Alaska, and spent his childhood in Ketchikan. His first work of fiction, Legend of a Suicide, was originally published in 2008. It won seven literary awards and was selected for twenty-five 'Books of the Year' lists including the New York Times.

On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, a marriage is unravelling. 
 
Gary, driven by thirty years of diverted plans, and Irene, haunted by a tragedy in her past, are trying to rebuild their life together. Following the outline of Gary's old dream, they're hauling logs out to Caribou Island in good weather and in terrible storms, in sickness and in health, to patch together the kind of cabin that drew them to Alaska in the first place. 
 
Across the water on the mainland, Irene and Gary's grown daughter, Rhoda is starting her own life. She fantasizes about the perfect wedding day, whilst her betrothed, Jim the dentist, wonders about the possibility of an altogether different future. 
 
From the author of the massively-acclaimed Legend of a Suicide, comes a devastating novel about a marriage, a couple blighted by past shadows and the weight of expectation, of themselves and of each other. Brilliantly drawn and fiercely honest in its depiction of love and disappointment, David Vann's first novel confirms him as one of America's most dazzling writers of fiction.

Legend of a Suicide

An extraordinary, ground-breaking piece of fiction ... Nothing quite like this book has been written before

Vann uses startling powers of observation to create strong characters, tense scenes and genuine surprises

Oh my god, Legend of a Suicide just bowled me over completely. It is such a tender, heartbreaking, breathtaking, horrifying and insanely compelling read that when I finished it I went straight back to the beginning and round again. I implore anyone with functioning eyes to read this book

Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine

So hard to put down that I am thinking of suing David Vann for several hours of lost sleep

This book squeezes more life out of the first hundred pages than most books could manage in a thousand, which is pretty impressive, considering it's a book about death

In his portrayal of a young son's love for his lost father David Vann has created a stunning work of fiction: surprising, beautiful and intensely moving

Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers

One of the most gripping debuts I've ever read

Impossible to put down and equally impossible to forget

An American classic ... harrowing but beautifully wrought ... prose as clear and bracing as a mountain stream

One jaw-droppingly powerful, courageous and original fiction debut...As a 10th work of fiction this would be impressive; as a debut, it is remarkable

Hands down the best fictional debut we have read this year

For the imagery alone and for the sentences, the book would be a treasure, but the story it tells - the story of the suicide of the author's father - has an immediacy and sharpness made all the more special by the tone of distance in the narrative and the beauty of the writing

David Vann's Legend of a Suicide is brave, fantastically well written, and completely defies categorisation

Julie Myerson, Daily Telegraph books of the year

From the shores of Vann's Alaska one can see the Russia of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons ... 'A father, after all,' Vann writes, 'is a lot for a thing to be.' A son is also a lot for a thing to be; so is an artist. With Legend of a Suicide David Vann proves himself a fine example of both

David Vann was born on Adak Island, Alaska and spent his childhood in Ketchikan. A contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Men's Journal, Outside and National Geographic Adventure, he is author of the best-selling memoir A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea and a forthcoming novel, Caribou Island. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a Wallace Stegner Fellow, taught at Stanford and Cornell, and is currently a professor at the University of San Francisco. Legend of a Suicide won the 2007 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction.

Roy is still young when his father, a failed dentist and hapless fisherman, puts a .44 magnum to his head and commits suicide on the deck of his beloved boat. Throughout his life, Roy returns to that moment, gripped by its memory and the shadow it casts over his small-town boyhood, describing with poignant, mercurial wit his parents' woeful marriage and inevitable divorce, their kindnesses and weaknesses, the absurd and comic turning-points of his past. Finally, in Legend of a Suicide, Roy lays his father's ghost to rest. But not before he exacts a gruelling, exhilarating revenge. 
 
 
Revolving around a fatally misconceived adventure deep in the wilderness of Alaska, this is a remarkably tender story of survival and disillusioned love.

David Vann

This Medea is intelligent and cynical, slighted by a husband and her gender. She is a woman who craves revenge for the fate of being born a woman and thus rendered powerless in a world ruled by men. Vann strips away the softer parts of Medea’s character as ruthlessly as Medea slits throats ... The centrepiece of Bright Air Black is the butchering of Pelias, a long and magnificently gruesome scene, described in stomach-churning detail ... Vann leaves us with the troubling paradox that murderous Medea is also a devoted mother ... Vann evokes this visceral, sensual, brutal world of warring city states, capricious gods and fragile human agency in a fractured prose style, reminiscent of ancient Greek drama and poetry. Short poetic phrases pile up, fall away, stop short. Powerful internal rhythms build and subside, like the waves the Argonauts sail over ... The time and the place may be very different from his previous novels, but Bright Air Black shares the same central structure of a searing family drama set against a backdrop of untamed nature … At the heart of this ambitious, dazzling, disturbing and memorable novel lies the uneasy juxtaposing of the wild and the civilised, and the complex, shifting relationship between the two.

[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.

Bright Air Black is a poetic fever dream, beautiful and unflinchingly primal. A vivid and forceful retelling of Medea’s famous story.

Madeline Miller, author of 'The Song of Achilles'

[David Vann] allows Medea to devour him and his readers: to read his book is to be swallowed down into her mad mind … Her wonder at the sea, and the way its water buoys her up, prompts a beautiful passage … Vann is indebted to poets, and he grants himself great poetic licence in his handling of syntax … Vivid, often appalling, sometimes piercingly sad and frequently striking.

A retelling of an ancient tale, a retouched portrait of one of mythology’s most enthralling and notorious women, Medea … (Vann) gives us a ringside seat to a blood-soaked, viscera-dripping gore-fest. 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 … Vann’s content can be grim but his language has beauty and poise … [A] stunning depiction of one of mythology’s most complex characters … The tale is also one of great power and intensity. Bright Air Black possesses the same potency. Its dark energy shocks us and shakes us, yet it is impossible to pull away.

[A] compelling study of human nature stripped to its most elemental.

Any reimagining of the Greek myth of Medea, she who helped Jason acquire the Golden Fleece from her royal father and killed her children in revenge after Jason betrayed her, will never be a cozy read, yet Vann’s version is darker, edgier, and more discomfiting than most. It’s made up of prose incorporating both mesmerizing sentences and concentrated fragments … The setting has an otherworldly feel at times, which heightens the sense of the tale’s ancientness. Sensual and violent, often simultaneously, Vann’s novel evokes the primal force of women’s power.

In brilliant poetic prose Bright Air Black brings us aboard the ship Argo for its epic return journey across the Black Sea from Persia’s Colchis – where Medea flees her home and father with Jason, the Argonauts, and the Golden Fleece. Vann’s reimagining of this ancient tale offers a thrilling, realist alternative to the long held notions of Medea as monster or sorceress. We witness with dramatic urgency Medea’s humanity, her Bronze Age roots and position in Greek society, her love affair with Jason, and her tragic demise. 
 
Atmospheric and spellbinding, Bright Air Black is an indispensable, fresh and provocative take on one of our earliest texts and the most intimate and corporal version of Medea’s story ever told.

David Vann

Praise for Bright Air Black

This Medea is intelligent and cynical, slighted by a husband and her gender. She is a woman who craves revenge for the fate of being born a woman and thus rendered powerless in a world ruled by men. Vann strips away ...

[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 the ...

Bright Air Black is a poetic fever dream, beautiful and unflinchingly primal. A vivid and forceful retelling of Medea’s famous story.

This Medea is intelligent and cynical, slighted by a husband and her gender. She is a woman who craves revenge for the fate of being born a woman and thus rendered powerless in a world ruled by men. Vann strips away ...

[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 the ...

Bright Air Black is a poetic fever dream, beautiful and unflinchingly primal. A vivid and forceful retelling of Medea’s famous story.

This Medea is intelligent and cynical, slighted by a husband and her gender. She is a woman who craves revenge for the fate of being born a woman and thus rendered powerless in a world ruled by men. Vann strips away ...

[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 the ...

Bright Air Black is a poetic fever dream, beautiful and unflinchingly primal. A vivid and forceful retelling of Medea’s famous story.

Books by David Vann

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter