The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew
Few first novels garner the kind of powerful praise awarded this epic story that takes place on the dusty, remorseless Oklahoma frontier, where two brothers are deadlocked in a furious rivalry. Fayette is an enterprising schemer hoping to cash in on his brother's talents as a gunsmith. John, determined not to repeat the crime that forced both families to flee their Kentucky homes, doggedly follows his tenacious brother west, while he watches his own family disintegrate.Wondrously told through the wary eyes of John's ten-year-old daughter, Mattie, whose gift of premonition proves to be both a blessing and a curse, The Mercy Seat resounds with the rhythms of the Old Testament even as it explores the mysteries of the Native American spirit world. Sharing Faulkner's understanding of the inescapable pull of family and history, and Cormac McCarthy's appreciation of the stark beauty of the American wilderness, Rilla Askew imbues this momentous work with her tremendous energy and emotional range. It is an extraordinary novel from a prodigious new talent.
- Strange Business, a collection of linked stories that won the 1993 Oklahoma Book Award, is available from Penguin.
Rilla Askew is the author of Strange Business, a collection of stories, and of the novel The Mercy Seat, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Award and winner of the Western Heritage Award and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award in 2002 and was chosen for Oklahoma's statewide reading program in 2007. Other titles include the novels Harpsong and Kind of Kin and a collection of creative nonfiction, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place. Askew's essays and short fiction have appeared in AGNI, Tin House, World Literature Today, Nimrod, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and elsewhere. In 2009 Askew received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780670874675 |
| ISBN 10 | 0670874671 |
| Title | The Mercy Seat |
| Author | Rilla Askew |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Penguin Putnam Inc |
| Year published | 1997-12-31 |
| Number of pages | 448 |
| Prizes | Short-listed for PEN/Faulkner Award 1998 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |