Deliverance (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)

“You're hooked, you feel every cut, grope up every cliff, swallow water with every spill of the canoe, sweat with every draw of the bowstring. Wholly absorbing [and] dramatic.”—Harper's Magazine

The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance.

Praise for Deliverance

“Once read, never forgotten.” —Newport News Daily Press

“A tour de force . . . How a man acts when shot by an arrow, what it feels like to scale a cliff or to capsize, the ironic psychology of fear: these things are conveyed with remarkable descriptive writing.” —The New Republic

“Freshly and intensely alive . . . with questions that haunt modern urban man.” —Southern Review

“A fine and honest book that hits the reader's mind with the sting of a baseball just caught in the hand.” —The Nation

“[James Dickey's] language has descriptive power not often matched in contemporary American writing.” —Time

“A harrowing trip few readers will forget.” — Asheville Citizen-Times

"A novel that will curl your toes . . . Dickey's canoe rides to the limits of dramatic tension." —New York Times Book Review 

"A brilliant and breathtaking adventure." —The New Yorker