Synopses & Reviews
Nicola Griffith has been praised by the widest variety of admirers – from crime writer Dennis Lehane's "outstanding" to poet Allen Ginsberg's "astonishingly gifted" – and in the widest variety of ways, from the
Washington Post admitting it's "hard to overpraise the taut plotting and broad intelligence" of her work to the
Los Angeles Times acclaiming her "beautifully written [sentences]... shimmering with many levels and complex meanings" to the
Village Voice dubbing her a sort of literary "Femme Nikita."
With Stay, Griffith has written her most accomplished and searing work. She juxtaposes beauty and brutality in a stunning amalgam of pyrotechnic noir poetry to match James Ellroy, lush meditativeness that recalls Barbara Kingsolver, and hard-boiled moral conviction worthy of Andrew Vachss. And she develops her hero, Aud, bristling with emotional complexity and barely suppressed violence, into one of the most fascinating protagonists in fiction today.
Stay opens with Aud, normally the epitome of cool-under-fire contained competence, disintegrating with grief and guilt over the violent death of her lover. These emotions are new to her, and she has moved deep into the North Carolina woods, away from people, afraid of what she might do if pushed. Into her refuge comes her oldest friend asking an impossible favor: to track down his missing fiancée, a woman Aud despises. The police won’t take his concern seriously, and Aud – an ex-cop whose sense of right and wrong has little respect for the law – is the only person he can turn to for help. But to follow the woman’s trail to New York City, she must leave the shelter of her trees and confront a series of physical, moral, and emotional challenges that she has been dodging for weeks, months, and years. None of her choices are easy.
Stay is a dazzling showcase for Griffith’s literary talent. She layers an array of different elements – urban tension and pastoral beauty, complex characters and white-knuckled narrative suspense, lyric prose and visceral violence – into a novel of depth, subtlety, and riveting noir storytelling.
From the eBook edition.
Review
Aud lurches
through her adventures like an iceberg on a boiling sea. Griffith's tautly balanced prose perfectly complements her
heroine's erratic progress. Whether immersing readers in a molten bath of sexual tension or deftly undercutting the solidity
of the ghostly companion Aud creates to assuage her loneliness, Griffith skillfully links sensual details with emotional
content, anchoring us firmly in Aud's brutal, beautiful world. Seattle Times
Review
"Sleek, sexy, and
decidedly dangerous, Aud Torvingen is everything a suspense novel heroine should be." The Advocate
Review
"Griffith's prose is at once brutal and beautifully wrought." San Diego Union-Tribune
Review
"Noir fiction at its modern best. The protagonist has lost a loved one just as a friend arrives to get help in finding his own girlfriend who has disappeared while on a business trip. This book has a feel somewhere between Touch of Evil and Sleepless in Seattle. A fine line to walk but Griffith proves herself an expert." Todd Morgan, The Lafayette Book Store, Lafayette CA
Nicola Griffith on PowellsBooks.Blog
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