This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt. You may receive a partial or no refund on used, damaged or materially different returns.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Monday, April 8 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35. Order within 16 hrs 42 mins

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Newberry Products

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$21.96
& FREE Shipping

Sold by: five star ten number

Added

Not added

$25.99
FREE Shipping on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.

Sold by: Pearlzone

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Kathryn Davis

Follow

The Thin Place: A Novel Hardcover – January 26, 2006

by Kathryn Davis (Author)

56

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$17.84","priceAmount":17.84,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"17","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"84","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"Yk8R%2FU27Lq0nUtwQR%2Fd2qb9gbjpIQj33rnM2XwyvqN4WX%2B1YMW9u7M4Rj3%2Bp2qfcTSoCjHrH8N2G66kM2SxNEOk%2Bqdq28EiRXSFoQhbju2xB5hDrDXXMynZ77MVuHn4QxaTx%2F1VwBY4%2Bqu01UpAeWDMJrVcNwcSnrtHecuIyaBQABzBvRs%2F%2BtJ5Wn8gHFiry","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$5.32","priceAmount":5.32,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"5","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"32","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"Yk8R%2FU27Lq0nUtwQR%2Fd2qb9gbjpIQj33e2O4vvlIKAayyAI68MuF6S54psrLuskZU2qDQOTE91trcouoAV2%2FFCcZZK8%2B49wjCSGDbv2EufOy8I2Hfy7OMbAo3kKfUlVfJUfRJgnZWWggU9XCIWRMzY82nXKUU%2FW9nvEW9KQfelUoYNdYafkC2h3eg%2BleMT9K","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

Discovering a dead body at a lake near the Canadian border, twelve-year-old Mees Kipp inexplicably brings the man back to life and realizes that she possesses an extraordinary gift that irrevocably shapes the lives of Mees, her two friends, and their community. By the author of Versailles.

Print length

277 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Little, Brown & Co.
Publication date

January 26, 2006
Dimensions

5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

0316735043
ISBN-13

978-0316735049
See all details

Kathryn Davis
25
Paperback
31 offers from $3.57

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Davis stretches relationships over centuries and species in this loopy follow-up to her historical, Versailles. When three schoolgirls come upon a seemingly dead neighbor, Mr. Banner, prostrate on the beach, he is revived by the uncanny spiritual powers of one of the girls, Mees Kipp, a strange fatherless waif who is also able to communicate with dogs. The narrative's point-of-view jumps among various characters (including a dog) as Davis explores the teeming, deceitful, hidden lives of the small church-going community and teases out its history via the journal of a late 19th-century schoolmarm who harbors a secret passion. (She perished with her pupils in what has become known as the Sunday School Outing Disaster; the 1870s tragedy still haunts the town.) Meanwhile, in the Crockett Home for the Aged, sharp-witted Helen Zeebrugge, at 92, simmers at the stupidity and condescension of her caretakers; her only son, Piet, in his vigorous 60s, is looking for wife number five and is tired of dating the athletic French teacher at the high school. With her eye on Piet, 50-ish divorcée Billie Carpenter, new to town and unattached, possesses the clarity to grasp the larger supernatural realignment that's taking place in Varennes, as evil (or senseless mortality) is replaced by a life-affirming force: love. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

In the opening pages of this brilliant, peculiar book, three small-town girls discover a man's corpse at the edge of a lake, and one of them, Mees Kipp, mysteriously brings him back to life. Davis writes hallucinatory, literate prose, and adopts a cosmic perspective: she is concerned with nothing less than describing the town's every waking moment. The experiences of Mees's dog, trotting through a clearing that smells of porcupine, stand alongside those of a minister's wife reading her morning paper and "confronting whatever form the devil had chosen to assume overnight." In any other book, a magical resurrection would be a central event; for Davis, it's just another moment in a particular place.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

From Bookmarks Magazine

The thin place is a Celtic term used to describe the diaphanous realm where the spiritual and physical worlds combine. In her lyrically brilliant sixth novel (after Versailles, 2002), Kathryn Davis imagines a town rooted in the thin place. Every living thing is intricately connected here: humans, animals, and vegetables all have their say. Critics admit the novel is difficult to summarize, but all commend the powerful poetry in Davis's loopy, mystical examination of time, morality, and everyday joys. What it lacks in page-turning plotone exists, but it is secondaryis trumped by the revelatory narrative voices.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Cosmic in her vision, provocative and comic in her storytelling, Davis draws on sources as diverse as quantum physics and tales of saints and miracles and makes place a key element in her exploratory fiction. Here, following her unusual historical novel Versailles (2002), she depicts a small town along the Canadian border on a glacier-carved terrain encompassing the aptly named Black Lake and teeming with beavers, bugs, birds, dogs, cats, and grasses. Three girls come across a man lying on the beach, seemingly dead. Two go for help, one stays. The man recovers. This girl has unusual powers. Davis' wry, sometimes gleeful, sometimes gloomy omniscient narrator turns her attention to a woman restoring a diary from 1872 kept by a schoolteacher responsible for a terrible tragedy. Davis then tunes in to the consciousness of Helen--smart, classy, and impatient with life in a home for the aged, her handsome son, the two women he is involved with, various animals wild and domestic, and even plants. As strange and deadly events unfold, Davis works out a calculus of the accidental and the inevitable and maps the interface of the natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"She is to contemporary fiction what Emily Dickinson was to 19th-century poetry. A delightful, surprise-filled narrative: Davis s best! -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown & Co. (January 26, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 277 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316735043
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316735049
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,097,374 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #115,989 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
56

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Kathryn Davis

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5

56 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

James Hiller

A realization of Whitman?

Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2006

Verified Purchase

Kathryn Davis is a new author to me. Critically recognized for some of her other work, Davis has somehow managed to stay in the popular shadows of fiction. Now, with the publication of her sixth book, The Thin Place, hopefully this will drag her into the light of being well known, inventive, and incredibly literate.

This book tells the tale of the citizens of Varennes, a little town close to the Canadian border, who are also closely connected by little silver threads of desire, envy, anger, greed, love, lust, and growth. It starts with three girls finding a body on the beach, and one of the girls striving for the miraculous and bringing the man back to life. Over the pages we meet an elderly lady living in a retirement home, her son who jumps from marriage to marriage because he loves women, another woman who restores books, one who ushers in church, a teacher who is putting on a play for his students which brings us back to the girls.

The Thin Place is by no means an easy novel or a quick read. It demands your attention from the first page, and should anything wrestle your focus away for even a moment, you find yourself lost. Partially this is due to Davis' incredible fluid writing style. One might liken it to a stream running over your page, as attention shifts about in a scene much as if a camera would in filming erratically. It's in this fluidity that the beauty of Davis' prose rests. She doesn't ignore the meager nor the less-important, everything gets a voice in her writing; from dogs, to beaver, to lichen to the ice sheets moving over the earth in its great sculpting array.

Much of this reminds me of Whitman and his poetry. As he strove to encompass all around him in his verse, Davis strives to encompass all in her paragraphs. The effect, for both, in enlighting and illuminating. Both highlight the interconnectedness of everything; of how we all live in dangerously tight webs and should not expect to move without effecting all around.

The Thin Place is a great novel. It is demanding, exacting, and noticing all. It is a gentle roller coaster ride in literature that you never quite sure when you'll get off, but when you do, you'll want to get on all over again.

54 people found this helpful

Helpful

JET

Different for everyone - but worth the "trouble"

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2006

Verified Purchase

The premise of the story has been summarized by other reviewers, so I won't take the time to do it here, but I will note that I bought this book after reading a review, thinking that it was going to be more focused on the supernatural, the review leading me to think that the focus was the "thin place," the division between this world and the next that is thinner in Varennes than in other places. I envisioned ghosts or magical realism, of sorts. In short, this book was not what I expected.

That being said, there is an element of the supernatural in this book, but only one element. The whole of the book is based firmly and viscerally in reality. Davis has an extremely keen ability at description and fluid prose, one of the best I've read, and I often found myself delighted by the aptness of her descriptions, putting into words ideas that have fleetingly crossed my mind (like the description of dogs' heads smelling of popcorn).

Other reviewers, and friends of mine that have read the book, have found it confusing, or difficult to stick with. I disagree - although there are many characters, and the prose deviates regularly from the plot (i.e., the daily lives of the town's residents, and how their paths ultimately cross) to describe the thoughts of beavers, moose, lichen, or to meditate on the creation of the world, or to jump back to medieval times to explore events of the Bible - it was easy to form a picture of the place, to differentiate the characters, and to understand the prevailing themes of interconnectedness and transience.

For some, this will be the story of a town and its residents. For others, this will be a religious novel, while others will find it a philosophical journey. Whatever the book is to each reader, I know that it will be unlike anything you have read before, and you will get something out of it, IF you open your mind and let yourself be swept away with the current of the story.

17 people found this helpful

Helpful

darswords

Glad I didn't buy the book

Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2012

The first time I tried it from the library this is what I thought: The font on this library hardback is too small. I made it through the first chapter and it looks to be a good book. Put in a request for the large-print or audio version at the library. Requested that it be available to Kindle at Amazon. Hopefully I can try this again someday.
***
Second try: Now, I have not only the large print hard cover edition from the library but I bought the Audible version with Shelly Frasier as narrator. The font on the hardback is larger but the space between lines and lack of paragraph spaces still make this a hard read for me. So I listened more than read. Shelly has a nice voice and reads the story as I feel I would have in my head. It is a pleasant book. A pleasant story. But for the most part I feel I have lived a life similar to this having lived in two small towns and been a member of numerous churches. Peyton Place. Gossip city. Mostly where I lost my hope for human kind.

I felt nothing for the characters. I felt no growth. I did like the dog and the cat. But felt Christopher Moore did a better job with the inner thoughts of a dog in The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove. So the dog brought up the star rating to two stars.

I had hope. I kept waiting for the point. Then I started waiting for the death of the people as it seemed that was where the author was determined to go.

But my decision to raise this to three stars is the poetic prose. Kathryn Davis' descriptions are marvelous. I suppose if this were one of the only books in a cabin in the woods this would be great to read. With 3,000 books on my Kindle (or actually on my Calibre) to read this--well, I am glad to be on to some other read.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Kate Hopkins

Bizarre Small-Town Fantasy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 9, 2018

Verified Purchase

I struggle to actually work out what this book is about! It takes place in a small town on the American-Candian border, called Varennes, and opens with a young and otherwise unremarkable girl called Mees (she's not Dutch, she's named after a river, I think), magically restoring a middle-aged man to life after he's had a heart attack. The rest of the book deals with the lives and adventures of various of the town's eccentric inhabitants. Andrea Murdock researches the strange history of Varennes, crashes her car and ends up in a coma, local Don Juan Piet Zeebrugge falls truly in love for the first time with the mysterious Billie (that's a woman) and leaves his girlfriend Chloe for her, his mother Helen bravely faces her lot as a ninety-something in an old people's home, Mees's friends Lorna and Sunny have all the usual worries about adolescence, various pets disappear in strange ways, and the book reaches a very bizarre climax - including the return of Chloe's errant husband - at the Pentecost service at the local Episcopal Church.

Davis writes beautifully - her chapters told from the point of view of animals are particularly good - and has lots of interesting thoughts on religion and spirituality. But the book suffers from rather hazy characterization (nobody is that interesting, and the dreamy, almost hallucinatory ambience means that few of the characters feel quite alive) and a rather meandering plot which goes in all sorts of odd directions (including at one point police reports, making it seem as though we're in the middle of some kind of crime thriller). I liked the religious references, but it never became clear how Davis was linking her modern story to themes from the Bible, so the references, though beautiful, never felt as though they had much meaning. I found the ending a terrible anti-climax, and the number of animal deaths (and the author's relaxed attitude to these) upsetting - ditto the lack of any sense of tragedy in the human deaths. The beauty of the language made me expect some sort of meaningful and profound read - but in the end the book resolved into a rather depressing story of rather hopeless people. So it was all a bit depressing.

I've liked some of this author's other books - most recently 'The Walking Tour' but this just left me feeling baffled and a bit 'flat'.

See more reviews

Buy new: $17.84$17.84 FREE delivery: Tuesday, April 9 Ships from: Opus Bookus Sold by: Opus Bookus

Buy used: $5.32

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the author

The Thin Place: A Novel Hardcover – January 26, 2006

Purchase options and add-ons

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From The New Yorker

From Bookmarks Magazine

From Booklist

Review

Product details

Videos

About the author

Kathryn Davis

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new:

$17.84

FREE delivery: Tuesday, April 9

Ships from: Opus Bookus

Sold by: Opus Bookus

Buy used:

$5.32