Imagine a scene of rural serenity, a night scene. Imagine a solitary ranch high in the Rocky Mountains, fireflies, a man and a woman asleep. Who would expect such tranquility to be brutally shattered by night visitors? Giovanni's Gift restores the thriller to its classic roots--the myth of Pandora's box has never before been rendered with such intensity. Simultaneous release with the Viking hardcover. 4 cassettes.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
"Imagine a scene of rural serenity, a night scene." So begins the first chapter of Bradford Morrow's latest novel, Giovanni's Gift. However pastoral this start may seem, in a few short paragraphs, Morrow succeeds in shattering the peace as he sets up the central mystery of the book: an unknown trespasser conducts a campaign of terror against the inhabitants of a lonely farm somewhere in "the western mountains." Loud music blares in the middle of the night, phone lines are cut, an effigy hangs from an ash tree, a door is stolen--over the course of several months these and other random acts of harassment begin to wear on Henry and Edmé Fulton. Eventually, Edmé's nephew, Grant, arrives from Rome to help unravel the truth behind these increasingly disturbing events. Unfortunately , the mystery behind Giovanni's Gift begins to unravel for the reader long before the characters figure it out.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In the memorable Trinity Fields, Morrow evoked wild Western landscapes magnificently, in all their glorious weathers and shifting lights. He does so again in this tale of an elderly architect and his wife, living quietly in a remote mountain valley, whose lives are suddenly and violently disrupted by horrendous noises breaking the silent nights. Enter their nephew, narrator Grant, a young drifter who seems permanently in romantic heat, and who has just separated, in Rome, from his second wife. An anxious call brings him back to Ash Creek, the only steady home he has ever known, and he begins to try to seek out the source of the malevolent nocturnal disturbances. He also falls for beautiful Helen, whose father, Giovanni Trentas, a friend of Uncle Henry and Aunt Edme, met a violent end in the valley some years before. It soon becomes apparent that a beautiful cigar box in which Giovanni kept souvenirs and mysterious scraps of diary (and which gives this book its gorgeous cover) hides dark secrets about his death, a long-buried romance and Helen's real parentage. The reader is on to most of this before Grant apparently is, and the circuitous way in which he comes to his discoveries, coupled with his oddly shifty nature, considerably slackens what should have been a much tenser narrative. Somehow, the human drama never lives up to the epic quality of Morrow's prose, and the book, for all its beauties and some passages of fine romantic ardor, never quite comes to life. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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More About the Author
Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he worked as a bookseller until relocating to New York City in 1981, where he began editing the literary journal "Conjunctions" and writing novels.
His first five novels--"Come Sunday" (1988), "The Almanac Branch" (1992, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), "Trinity Fields" (Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, 1995), "Giovanni's Gift" (1997) and "Ariel's Crossing" (2002)--are all available as e-books from Open Road Media from January 25, 2011.
In collaboration with eighteen artists, Morrow is the author of "A Bestiary," as well as a book for children, "Didn't Didn't Do It," illustrated by the legendary Gahan Wilson. Morrow has also edited and written a number of other books, including "Posthumes" (poetry), "The New Gothic" (with Patrick McGrath) and "The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth" (with Sam Hamill) and has contributed to many anthologies and journals. As founding editor of "Conjunctions," he has edited over 55 volumes of the journal from 1981 to the present. An anthology on death, "The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death," co-edited with David Shields, will be published by W.W. Norton in February 2011.
His new novel, "The Diviner's Tale," is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and in England with Corvus (Atlantic), as well as an audiobook with Blackstone. His first collection of short stories, "Lush," will be published in Fall 2011 by Pegasus Books. He is completing work on his seventh novel, "The Prague Sonata," as well as a book of creative nonfiction works, "Meditations on a Shadow."
Morrow's many awards include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, as well as the PEN/Nora Magid Award. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Brown Universities and for the past twenty years has been a Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College.
Visit his website at www.bradfordmorrow.com.
His first five novels--"Come Sunday" (1988), "The Almanac Branch" (1992, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), "Trinity Fields" (Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, 1995), "Giovanni's Gift" (1997) and "Ariel's Crossing" (2002)--are all available as e-books from Open Road Media from January 25, 2011.
In collaboration with eighteen artists, Morrow is the author of "A Bestiary," as well as a book for children, "Didn't Didn't Do It," illustrated by the legendary Gahan Wilson. Morrow has also edited and written a number of other books, including "Posthumes" (poetry), "The New Gothic" (with Patrick McGrath) and "The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth" (with Sam Hamill) and has contributed to many anthologies and journals. As founding editor of "Conjunctions," he has edited over 55 volumes of the journal from 1981 to the present. An anthology on death, "The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death," co-edited with David Shields, will be published by W.W. Norton in February 2011.
His new novel, "The Diviner's Tale," is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and in England with Corvus (Atlantic), as well as an audiobook with Blackstone. His first collection of short stories, "Lush," will be published in Fall 2011 by Pegasus Books. He is completing work on his seventh novel, "The Prague Sonata," as well as a book of creative nonfiction works, "Meditations on a Shadow."
Morrow's many awards include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, as well as the PEN/Nora Magid Award. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Brown Universities and for the past twenty years has been a Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College.
Visit his website at www.bradfordmorrow.com.
Customer Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a great book,
By A Customer
This review is from: Giovanni's Gift (Hardcover)
I read about this book and thought it couldn't be as good as they said it was. It is! I grew up in the West, and the author's way with painting images of the Western landscape just kept sending these little shocks through me, it was so true. Plus there's really good, deep writing about families and a love-story that breaks your heart. It's been a long time since a novel has kept me up at night and caused me to wake in the morning with a sore neck, but Giovanni's Gift did. It's the kind of book you want to give to friends
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant! Inspired! (At least to my tiny 13 year old mind.),
By "silveryflute" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Giovanni's Gift (Mass Market Paperback)
I loved Mr. Morrow's writing style and prose. Some people say it was boring, but I thought it was just enough to pull you into the book. I found it very suspenseful towards the end, and was somewhat surprised by the ending. I enjoyed the book immensely.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling, well written, good read,
By A Customer
This review is from: Giovanni's Gift (Hardcover)
I would have rated this book a ten except for the fact that at times it is overdescriptive and slows the tension of the story. That said I must admit as a writer that I was a little green with envy at Morrow's gift of prose. This is a facinating mystery as well as just a well written narrative. This is the first in its genre that I did not feel compelled to try to figure it out until the end, I just let the reading come and enjoyed it a lot
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