The startling novel from a brilliant young Irish novelist on the rise,
who "has a sensational gift for a sentence" (Colum McCann on Red Sky in
Morning).
In Donegal in the spring of 1945, a farmhand runs into a burning barn
and does not come out alive. The farm's owner, Barnabas Kane, can only
look on as his friend dies and all 43 of his cattle are destroyed in the
blaze. Following the disaster, the bull-headed and proudly
self-sufficient Barnabas is forced to reach out to the community for
assistance.
But resentment simmers over the farmhand's death, and Barnabas and his
family begin to believe their efforts at recovery are being sabotaged.
Barnabas is determined to hold firm. Yet his teenage son struggles under
the weight of a terrible secret, and his wife is suffocated by the
uncertainty surrounding their future. As Barnabas fights ever harder for
what is rightfully his, his loved ones are drawn ever closer to a fate
that should never have been theirs. In The Black Snow, Paul Lynch
takes the pastoral novel and -- with the calmest of hands -- tears it
apart. With beautiful, haunting prose, Lynch illuminates what it means
to live through crisis, and puts to the test our deepest certainties
about humankind.
