Unhallowed Ground

This beautifully executed first novelsets 17-year old Manny Moreno, the sonof a Chilean immigrant and a descendantof New England Yankees, against incomprehensible, intractable and criminalelements of society. Living in a jerry-built shack with a drunken, promiscuous mother and a retarded sister, Manny haunts the nearby Connecticut swamp flushing deer as well as a pack of crazed dogs. The swamp is owned by Manny's employer, crippled millionaire William Cahill, cruel, arrogant and vicious. Manny seeks meaning from his world in the myths spun by his grandfather, Nat Tarbox. It is from these tales and it isin the swamp that Manny uncovers the riddle of his father's and his brother'sdisappearances years before. Totally in command of his narrative, equally skillful in capturing emotional nuances and evoking the natural world, Guernsey makes a bizarre situation credible by populating it with vivid characters, each of whom is memorable by virtue of a clearly articulated motivation. (August 27)