The Heavenly Table

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Cane, Cob and Chimney Jewett are young Georgia sharecroppers held under the thumb of their God-fearing father, Pearl. When he dies unexpectedly, they set out on horseback for Canada, robbing and looting their way to wealth and infamy.

But little goes to plan and soon they’re pursued by both the authorities and the stories emanating from their trail of destruction – making the Jewett Gang out to be the most fearsome trio of murdering bank robbers in the Midwest. The truth, though, is far more complex than the legend. And the heaven they’ve imagined may in fact be worse than the hell they sought to escape.

The Heavenly Table is brilliant and unforgettable. In his trademark blend of humor and pathos, Donald Ray Pollock gives us a view into life's dark corners, without ever forgetting there is a lighter side as well

Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust and The Son

A blood-laced tale of three brothers who rob and kill their way across the US. [The Heavenly Table] will be a book you won’t be able to stop recommending once you’ve finished… A bit like reading Hunter S Thompson crossed with Cormac McCarthy – and a sprinkling of Nick Cave chucked in for brutal measure. It’s the kind of book you just know the Coen Brothers are itching to adapt, with its vast array of quirky characters and black humour

ShortList

Truly fabulous… A very wry comedy… When reviewing, I usually mark down pages with particularly well-honed phrases: I stopped doing so when reading The Heavenly Table as I probably would have bookmarked every page…Witty and expansive… I am tempted to say that anyone wanting to understand contemporary America’s political direction might be well advised to start with this novel.
Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

About Donald Ray Pollock

After quitting school at seventeen, Donald Ray Pollock worked at Mead Paper Mill and as a truck driver in Chillicothe, Ohio. After thirty-two years employed as a labourer he enrolled at Ohio State University to study creative writing.

He is the author of two acclaimed books, the cult-classic short-story collection Knockemstiff, which went on to win the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, and the novel The Devil All The Time.

www.donaldraypollock.net

Details

Imprint: Vintage
Published: 20/07/2017
ISBN: 9781784703240
Length: 384 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
Weight: 266g
Price: £9.99

All editions

Paperback 2017
Ebook 2016

The Heavenly Table

Format:

Buy the book from:

The Heavenly Table is brilliant and unforgettable. In his trademark blend of humor and pathos, Donald Ray Pollock gives us a view into life's dark corners, without ever forgetting there is a lighter side as well

Dark, violent and funny, this book will be like nothing else you've ever read

There is something of the Coen Brothers in The Heavenly Table. This too is southern gothic… with a cast of grotesques, eccentric plot twists and humour of the blackest pitch… Pollock writes like an angel – an angel that has escaped from Knockemstiff lunatic asylum.

A tale of weird and darkly funny invention.

Donald Ray Pollock’s brilliant Western is an earthy, raunchy read – Dickensian in its rogue’s gallery of oddball characters. Full of black humour, it’s superbly constructed and written with true grit. By the end, one is left longing for more and panting for the movie that will surely come

Wild, rollicking, and wonderfully vulgar… A riotous satire that takes on our hopeless faith in modernity, along with our endless capacity for cruelty and absurd pretension.

A fine (and often very funny) multi-stranded yarn, set at the dawn of US involvement in WW1 with the nation on the cusp of modernity. As Tarantino's The Hateful Eight dared onscreen, The Heavenly Table lances the boil of modern America on the page.

Pollock’s freewheeling, blood-spilling story is well matched by his prose.

About Donald Ray Pollock

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