Outer Banks

<p><strong>An Omnibus Edition of Three Classic Early Novels from the Critically Acclaimed Author of <em>Cloudsplitter</em> and <em>Affliction</em></strong></p><p><strong>Banks has skillfully used his repertoire of contemporary techniques to write a novel that is classically American</strong>--<strong>a dark but sometimes funny romance with echoes of Poe and Melville. </strong>-- <strong><em>Washington Post</em></strong></p><p><strong>A marvelously written little book fascinatingly intricate yet deceptively simple. Well worth reading more than once. -- <em>New York Times Book Review</em></strong></p><p><em>Family Life: </em> Russell Banks's first novel is an adult fairy tale of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom where the myriad dramas of domesticity blend with an outrageous slew of murders mayhem coups debauches world tours and love in all guises transcendent or otherwise.</p><p><em>Hamilton Stark: </em> This tale of a solitary boorish misanthropic New Hampshire pipe fitter--the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother--is at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.</p><p><em>The Relation of My Imprisonment: </em> Utilizing a form invented by imprisoned seventeenth-century Puritan divines--an utterly sincere and detailed if highly artificial recounting of great suffering--Banks's novel is a remarkably inventive lovingly good-humored argument exploration and map of the caged religious mind.</p>