Aquarium

Twelve-year-old Caitlin lives alone with her mother in subsidised housing next to an airport in Seattle. Each day, while she waits to be picked up after school, Caitlin visits the local aquarium to study the fish. Gazing at the creatures within the watery depths, Caitlin accesses a shimmering universe beyond her own. When she befriends an old man at the tanks one day, who seems as enamoured of the fish as she, Caitlin cracks open a dark family secret and propels her once-blissful relationship with her mother towards a precipice of terrifying consequence.

In crystalline and graceful prose, Aquarium takes us into the heart of a brave young girl whose longing for love and capacity for forgiveness transform the damaged people around her. Relentless and heartbreaking, primal and redemptive, Aquarium is a transporting story from one of the best writers working today.

David Vann's internationally bestselling books have won fifteen prizes, including best foreign novel in France and Spain, and appeared on seventy-five Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. David is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick in England and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comte in France.

‘Vann is a brave writer, daring to write about and depict things that most other authors would baulk at, but that's what makes him so good - that unflinching eye for the darkness you could potentially find in any of us, given the wrong chain of events.’ Independent

‘Unlike Vann's other novels, which exist in a closed system of violence and despair, this story offers redemption.’ Kirkus Reviews

'Since electrifying the literary world five years ago with his debut novel, Legend of a Suicide, Vann has racked up an astonishing number of international awards. This lovely, wrenching novel should add to that list.' STARRED Review, Library Journal

‘[Vann] is the real thing—a mature, risk-taking and fantastically adept fiction writer who dares go to the darkest places, explore their most appalling corners.' Observer

‘As ever, Vann is good on gloom and at creating an atmosphere of queasy delight.’ Weekend Australian

‘Delicate, coming-of-age sensuality.’ New York Times

‘Aquarium is a powerful novel of family and loss, a coming of age story of secrets and lies, a mystery of love and hate. It is profoundly moving, utterly beautiful and almost unbearably painful, a breathtaking achievement of a book.’ Star

‘David Vann’s work has a spare, parable-like quality…[he] writes with deft control and a gift for prose propelled as effortlessly as a school of fish.’ Financial Times

‘Vann’s provocative prose is filled with a sense of wonder and beauty, even when the lives he describes are tragic.’ LA Times

‘Aquarium feels like a soft thing lined with blood: a small, resolutely inward-looking book, full of ornate sentences with a darkness that frequently makes you want to squint and flinch as you turn the pages.’ Guardian

‘While loss, abandonment, pain and anger bubble away below the surface here, Vann finally lets himself, his characters and the reader come up for air, with the unprecedented possibility of hope redemption and forgiveness.’ Otago Daily Times, 2015’s Literary Standouts