Rob Magnuson Smith
Author of:
The Gravedigger |
Rob Magnuson Smith
Winner of the Faulkner Society's 2004 Gold Medal for Best Novel
THE BOOK:
The Gravedigger is the debut novel of Rob Magnuson Smith who won the Faulkner Society's gold medal
for Best Novel in 2004.
It will be released by the University of New Orleans Press in trade paperback in October, 2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rob Magnuson Smith was raised in England and Oregon. His début novel The Gravedigger, winner of the 2004 Gold Medal in the Novel, will be released by UNO Press in September 2010. His short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Fiction International, Inkwell Magazine, The Greensboro Review, Notes from the Underground, and The Reader (UK). He currently divides his time between San Francisco and Norwich, England, where he is the 2009 - 10 David Higham Scholar at the University of East Anglia. Henry Bale, a bashful middle-aged gravedigger in the English hamlet of Chalk takes center stage in Smith's impressive debut. Henry is nervous about his own demise; he lives alone, the kind of man who fades into the background while listening to talk about the dearly departed. But his solitary life receives an unexpected jolt after meeting the new schoolteacher, 27-year-old Caroline Ford. Henry finds it unbelievable that Caroline is attracted to him and so begins to dwell on their eventual separation. "Everything made sense, alone. Before Caroline, Henry had only occupied space, like a headstone marking a hole." The townspeople watch the relationship unfold, morbidly curious, and "They were on him like flies after the separation," when Henry withdraws again until he uncovers a dark festering secret in one of the local parishes and makes a choice that could twist his quiet life. Smith's well-wrought prose beautifully captures the tone of an English village and the awakening of a man whose livelihood depends on death but whose fear keeps him from living. (Oct.)—Publishers Weekly
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