All Iowa Reads Announces 2010 Book - "Driftless" by David Rhodes
When David Rhodes’ first three novels were published in the mid-seventies, he was acclaimed as “one of the best eyes in recent fiction” (John Gardner), and compared favorably to Sherwood Anderson. In 1976, a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the waist down, and unpublished for the subsequent three decades.
With Driftless, Rhodes returns to the midwestern landscape he knows so well, offering a fascinating and entirely unsentimental portrait of a town apparently left behind by the march of time. Home to a few hundred people yet absent from state maps, Words, Wisconsin, comes richly to life by way of an extraordinary cast of characters. Among them, a middle-aged couple guards the family farm from the mendacious schemes of their milk co-operative; a lifelong paraplegic suddenly regains the use of her legs, only to find herself crippled by fury at her sister and caretaker; a woman of conflicting impulses and pastor of the local Friends church stumbles upon an enlightenment she never expected; a cantankerous retiree discovers a cougar living in his haymow, haunting him like a childhood memory; and a former drifter forever alters the ties that bind a community together.
At once intimate and funny, wise and generous, Driftless is an unforgettable story of contemporary life in rural America.
The following URL links to an audio of a "Live from Prairie Lights" program recorded last summer when Rhodes was there. http://www.prairielights.com/david-rhodes
Book reviews, information about David Rhodes, posters, bookmarks, a news release and purchasing information are available now. Discussion questions and the supplemental reading list willl be available soon. Please check the Web site regularly, and remember to add your book discussion event to the Iowa Center for the Book Web site for a chance to win 10 copies of the 2011 book.
