Aquarium - Hardcover

"A triumph" (Daily Mail)

"His prose is as clear, fresh and invigorating as a starry winter night on an Aleutian mountainside, and his intriguing scenarios make his books easy to devour in a few urgent sittings" (The Times)

"A stirring tale that isn’t as simple as it first appears." (Esquire)

"A blue-collar parable ... [The character] looks back on her life as a child looks into a tank, hoping to make sense of the world inside – a theme that Vann develops beautifully, creating a mysterious realm of the wintry American city’" (Guardian)

"Vann spins a powerful tale of guilt and resentment, steeped in the atmosphere of a bleak winter city" (Mail on Sunday)

"Brilliant ... Aquarium is as rich as good poetry and as addictive as a first-class detective novel" (Spectator)

"Strangely beguiling ... [Vann’s] writing echoes Faulkner’s in its feeling for the means by which children might uncannily echo their parents ... he is responding to a genuine tendency that many children have, to shape the calls and responses and perceptions and stories according to their favourite animals ... Aquarium offers a new direction for Vann’s writing, in which his characteristically unsparing eye for cruelty begins to consort with more lyrical voices." (Times Literary Supplement)

"A genuine departure for Vann, an authentically new direction ... Its delicate, coming-of-age sensuality and bright saltwater menagerie ... leaves more air and space for the reader ... and it has a softer touch." (New York Times)

"Aquarium may be elegantly written and fiercely imagined, but it is also a beautiful book" (Chicago Tribune)

"He is expert at showing the way that damaged, screwed-up adults inflict harm on children" (Catherine O'Flynn)

A lyrical and moving new novel from the author of Legend of a Suicide.

Twelve-year-old Caitlin lives alone with her mother -a docker at the local container port - in subsidized housing next to an airport in Seattle. Each day, while she waits to be picked up after school, Caitlin visits the local aquarium to study the fish. Gazing at the creatures within the watery depths, Caitlin accesses a shimmering universe beyond her own. When she befriends an old man at the tanks one day, who seems as enamoured of the fish as she, Caitlin cracks open a dark family secret and propels her once-blissful relationship with her mother toward a precipice of terrifying consequence.

In crystalline, chiselled yet graceful prose, Aquarium takes us into the heart of a brave young girl whose longing for love and capacity for forgiveness transforms the damaged people around her. Relentless and heart-breaking, primal and redemptive, Aquarium is a transporting story from one of the best American writers of our time.