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After her husband's death, a mother moves her family onto a farm and hatches a scheme to win back the land she used to own An unlikely criminal, Andy Durant is robbing gas stations to buy back land once connected to his wife's farm in upstate New York. But when he's shot and killed during a robbery, he leaves his wife, Grady, and their three children to fend for themselves. Moving back to the debt-laden farm, Grady ignites a plan that involves getting in the middle of an adjoining neighbor's marriage. Meanwhile, one by one the whole family is charmed by Royal Provo, a young and charismatic orphan working on the property. When the money Andy Durant stole resurfaces, all find themselves in escalating danger. Under the Dog Star is chillingly good storytelling.
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Reviews
"The mood of Under the Dog Star is modern Gothic, but the purity and discretion of his prose and his startling insights are Caldwell's own. He writes of the engrossing needs of the body and the greater compulsions of the spirit. His subjects are the small crimes and long punishments of the lonely and the dispossessed. Under the Dog Star is a beautiful, baleful, and entirely satisfying fiction."
Doris Grumbach
"On one level, the novel is a disturbing parable about innocence and evil, love and death. Yet on another level, it's simply a plain-spoken tale about one woman's efforts to begin a new life after the death of her husband. . . . It never seems implausible or unconvincing, so persuasively has Mr. Caldwell mapped out the darker impulses of the human heart."
The New York Times
"Caldwell strikes a consistently ominous tone, and his resolution is at once sharp and bittersweet."
The New York Times