A "New York Times" Best Book of the Year.
One of "Granta's" Best Young American Novelists.
Selected for the "New Yorker's" 20 Under 40.
Nominated for the Orange Prize .
Thirteen-year-old
Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family's
island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades.
But when illness fells Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner,
the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls
in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her
brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of
Darkness. As Ava sets out on a mission through the magical swamps to
save them all, we are drawn into a lush and bravely imagined debut that
takes us to the shimmering edge of reality.
Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in both "The New
Yorker's" debut fiction issue and "New York" magazine's list of
twenty-five people to watch under the age of twenty-six. She is a
graduate of the Columbia MFA program and is the 2005 recipient of the
Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award; her fiction has recently
appeared in "Conjunctions," "Granta," "Zoetrope," "Oxford American,"
and "The New Yorker," Twenty-five years old, she lives in New York City.
