THE TRACE
The Trace, Forrest Gander’s new masterful, poetic novel about a journey through Mexico, describes a couple recovering from a world shattered. Driving through the vast Chihuahua Desert, they retrace the steps of nineteenth-century American writer Ambrose Bierce, trying to piece together their lives after a devastating incident involving their adolescent son. With tenderness and precision, Gander explores the intimacies of their relationship as they travel through desert towns, through picturesque canyons and desertscapes, on a journey into themselves and through the heart of Mexico. As they take a short-cut through the brutally hot desert home, their car overheats miles from nowhere, the novel spinning out of control, and suddenly there are devastating consequences. . . . Poet Forrest Gander’s first novel As a Friend was acclaimed as “profound and relentlessly beautiful (Rikki Ducornet). With The Trace, Gander has accomplished another brilliant work, containing unforgettable glimpses of Mexico and a story both violent and tender.
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Reviews
Lowry Pressly at Los Angeles Review of Books
John Tytell at The American Book Review
John McElwee at Oxford American
Tobias Carroll at Inside Hook
Susan Donnelly Cheever at The Colorado Review
Lee Matalone in BookSlut
Tin House interview with John Benditt
Eric Blankenburg at Front Porch
Rob Cline at The Gazette
Nicholas Mancusi at The Daily Beast
Michelle Lancaster at Rain Taxi
Paris Review Staff Picks
John Toews at McNallyRobinson
Publishers Weekly starred review
Jason Diamond in Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Frances Mayes at GoodReads
Amanda Ferris at The Absolute Magazine
Andrea Denhoed at The New Yorker
Chad Felix at The Brooklyn Paper
FlavorWire Best Books of 2014
LargeHearted Boy
Tobias Carroll at Biographile
Hannah Alpert-Abrams at Full Stop
Annie Philbrick at The Day
The White Review
“The Many Deaths of Ambrose Bierce” at The Paris Review
Reyna Paz Avendaño en Cronica (México)
BookRiot’s 2014 Must-Read Books
René Steinke at Washington Independent Review of Books
FlavorWire Best Book Covers of 2014
Bustle: Best Book Covers of 2014
Daniel Handler: New York Times Book Review
Praise for Forrest Gander’s The Trace
“The Trace is a poet’s book, which is to say it is filled with the pleasures of language, sharply and skilfully used, but Forrest Gander also has the narrative drive of the best novelists. The Trace is a tense, propulsive thriller, which keeps on building until the very last page.”
“I haven’t read many novels as spooky and sublime and psychologically acute as Forrest Gander’s The Trace. It’s the portrait of a couple in crisis and their misguided road trip through the Chihuahua Desert, on the tracks of the writer Ambrose Bierce. Gander’s landscapes are lyrical and precise (“raw gashed mountains, gnarly buttes of andesite”), and his study of a marriage on the rocks is as empathetic as it is unsparing.”
“Gander’s poetic writing lends this adventure story a dense, brooding atmosphere; Dale and Hoa’s troubles unfold slowly in this carefully crafted novel of intimacy and isolation.”
“Blown away by the bitter poetry & bubbling tension of Forrest Gander’s The Trace— a brilliant take on a couple’s trip to Mexico going wrong.”