Goat Mountain
A shocking, suspenseful and daring new novel from one of the greatest American writers at work today, whose previous books include Caribou Island, Dirt and Legend of a Suicide.
In David Vann’s searing novel Goat Mountain, an eleven-year-old boy is eager to make his first kill at his family’s annual deer hunt. But all is not as it should be. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably.
Set over the course of one hot and hellish weekend, Goat Mountain is the story of a family struggling to contend with a terrible crime and its repercussions. David Vann creates a haunting and provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions – what we owe for what we’ve done.
David Vann is an internationally bestselling author whose work has been translated into nineteen languages. He is the winner of fifteen prizes, including France’s Prix Médicis Étranger, Spain’s Premi Llibreter, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, the Grace Paley Prize, a California Book Award, the AWP Non-fiction Prize, and France’s L’Express Readers’ Prize. His books – Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, Dirt, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth – have appeared on seventy Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Wallace Stegner Fellow, John L'Heureux Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he is a professor at the University of Warwick and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comté, France. He has written for publications such as the Atlantic, Esquire, McSweeney's, Sunday Times, Observer, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, Elle and many others. He has also appeared in documentaries for the BBC, Nova, National Geographic, and CNN.
www.davidvann.com