Title: The TrespasserPublished by: Southern Methodist University
Pages: 228
ISBN13: 978-0870745515
Overview
Set in the hills of Kentucky, Edra Ziesk’s third novel deals with boundaries and ownership, visible and invisible, present and past. It is the gripping story of what happens to a small Appalachian community when an outsider pays an unexpected visit, and everyone discovers there are many kinds of boundaries, and more than one way to trespass.
Praise
Edra Ziesk, a New York novelist, creates characters who stroll right into our imagination. Her prose is lush and evocative; her persistent, colorful descriptions are astoundingly varied and entertaining. And she respectfully renders the tricky, beautiful talk of mountain people. -Pamela Miller, StarTribune
“Ziesk’s plot is airtight. Her take on the area and the culture is astonishingly accurate. Her writing is at times lyric and wonderfully laden with symbolism. Ziesk’s book is the kind you can read and ponder more than once. It’s full of deep questions about the importance of place, the pull of history and the roles a society forces on people.”
-Greg Langley, Books Editor, The Advocate
“…a book about boundaries [w]e can’t see or understand.[A] death and a killer’s imprisonment soon cause other boundaries in the hills and community to become unsettled, and people [to] start trespassing on one another’s lives in this engrossing, well-crafted third novel.”
-The Dallas Morning News
“The Trespasser is a remarkable tale about the brief quiet times of life interrupted by events of violence that lead back to the preternatural quiet, all bound by brilliant crystaline language that speaks to the reader without bombast or flabbiness, all of it clear, dangerous,, exact, and utterly absorbing.”
-Paula Fox, author of Borrowed Finery
Ziesk’s novel moves seamlessly between the different lives brought together by their shared space, making the reader the ultimate intruder. In doing so, she evokes great sympathy for her characters—trespassed and trespassing alike."
-Indies Finalist, Foreword
“Edra Ziesk, in The Trespasser, has replicated a little piece of the hills of Kentucky and filled it with a cast of very real characters, with not a hero among them.”
-curledup.com
“Sebastian Bryant came to eastern Kentucky looking for photographs and stumbled into a closed little community whose code of behavior he would never understand. What happened to him rippled through the town in ways that would change other lives forever, sometimes for the good, and sometimes not.”
-bookchase.com
“I was caught up in the stories of these people in this place and privy to their secret lives… A triumph”
-Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
“A compelling story of love and home and family, of bonds and rifts and what endures, all delivered with Ziesk’s keen eye for detail, her unfailing ear for what can be said as well as what cannot, and her uncommon grace and insight.”
-Janet Peery, author of The River Beyond the World, finalist for the National Book Award
Excerpt
Sebastian Bryant was driving the mountain road that wound endlessly upwards without breach or pause, like a long-held breath. The road was pallid, flattened to bleakness by the hot white afternoon sun and by the absence of apparent habitation: he hadn’t passed another car nor seen another person. He suspected he’d been sent on a fool’s errand by the man in the luncheonette in the town where he’d stopped earlier. He was looking for a place to turn around when he saw the cabins.