Product Description

A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the sweat-smudged footprint on the inside of his windscreen doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily, hilariously try to reassemble themselves. His characters - marauding Vikings, washed-up entrepreneurs, and jobbing hacks on local papers - are adrift from the mainstream, confused by contemporary masculinity, angry and aimless. Combining electric prose with compassion and dark wit, this is a major debut.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4516 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
'This is a collection that, for once, lives up to the hype. Watch out for Wells' -Sunday Times --Review

Review
'His range is wide and his language impeccable, never strained or fussy' -New York Times

Review
'Tower routinely brings combustible materials together ... and has fun watching them ignite' -Observer

Customer Reviews

A striking debut collection of stories - an author to watch
These stories remind me of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor and many others, yet they are really very much their own thing. Wells Tower is clearly a writer of the American South, but on the whole he avoids cliche and instead has produced a collection of memorable, sometimes moving stories of a varied cast of characters. I look forward to more of his writing in future - he's a talent to watch.

Full of Life
Always on the lookout for a new writer to follow, I was supremely happy to find Wells Tower. The only problem is who knows how long I have to wait to see if he confirms his promise in the next book(s)?

First of all, the language is fresh and energetic. Prose is alive and well in Tower, in case anybody still thinks good writing is a thing of the past.

Second, each story has its own reality fully formed, and characters we have maybe met in real life, but never knew so well.

Looking forward to the next one!

Bleak but striking.
Wells Tower - Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned


Wells Tower, born in 1973, is a young American with a strong voice. His debut, a collection of short stories published by Granta this month, is full of vivid images and hard, punchy writing.

Wells' world is one of crushing disappointment and thwarted desire borne, for the most part, by lonely, silent men who are few of word but deep of feeling.

In The Brown Coast, a young man whose life has gone wrong on several fronts takes up an offer from his uncle to do up his uncle's coastal cottage. He finds comfort in collecting sea creatures in an old aquarium. Tower's prose manages to be masculine and gruff yet also hauntingly descriptive:

`The wood paneling in the living room had shrugged up over many moist summers, and now the walls looked like a relief map of unfriendly, mountainous land.'

Towers has a gift for using words in unconventional ways which seem instantly apt: `a stand of pine trees, limbless and spectral', `a jazz of oaths', `a confetti of moths ` around a light bulb.

In Retreat, the mercurial relationship between a pair of brothers explodes and then ebbs into uneasy truces. Their mutual envy and competitiveness threaten to destroy their chances of finding peace and happiness. Tower's language lurks and paints a desolate landscape, adding to the atmosphere:

`...the sunset smoldering behind the molars of the Appalachian range',

` pink insulation lay like an autopsy patient beneath the cloudy plastic sheeting.'

`... would suck the innocence and joy from his child as greedily as a desert wanderer savaging a found orange.'

`I wanted to get back to spinning the blanket of mindless incident stretched ever thinner across the pit of regrets I found myself peering into most sleepless nights.'

In Executors of Important Energies, a man's father is gripped by a form of dementia. `His store of memories just sprang a rapidly widening leak.'

`Down Through the Valley' is a tale of a journey from hell which a man has to take with his child and his ex-wife's smug new boyfriend. Lured by the prospect of buying a place in his ex wife's good books by doing her a favour, the man is sucked into a series of unfortunate events.

Tower is surprisingly astute when it comes to inhabiting a child narrator. In Leopard, a young boy skives off school, but has to contend with his hostile stepfather. Many unanswered questions are raised including one about the perpetrator of a horrific child murder nearby, but Tower leaves the reader wanting to know more.

In Wild America, a teenager is visited by her cousin who has grown to be a willowy beauty. Her rage and jealousy is powerfully conveyed:

`Jacey could feel the anger coming off her like heat lines on a road.'

And, after Jacey delivers a stinging put-down:

`A collapsed, stunned look came over Maya, as though a piece of crucial rigging had been snipped behind her face.'

Jacey inhabits a world between childhood and adulthood, and the potentially threatening undercurrents of what she's playing with are potently evoked.

On The Show is another chillingly atmospheric story set in the false neon bonhomie of a fairground where an appalling crime is committed. The reader knows that the criminal will never be caught. The claustrophobia of the dingy place and the lives of the various people who have ended up there are illuminated in Tower's grim flashlight.

The last story, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is a tale of Vikings and vengeance narrated by one of the more gentle of the fighters. Towers transposes modern language to this historical set, and this anachronism adds to the jarring, disturbing feel.

Tower is a distinctive voice and his hard-edged, brusque but evocative fiction will undoubtedly win fans.
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