Continental Drift - Softcover

Russell Banks is one of America's most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He lives in upstate New York and Miami, Florida.

"An excellent novel...An important novel because of the precise manner in which it reflects the spiritual yearning and materialistic frenzy of our contemporary life. It is also an extremely skillful book, both in its writing, which is impeccable, and in the way it unfolds...Always, Banks writes with tremendous knowledge, convictions, and authenticity." -- Chicago Tribune

"At its deepest level, Continental Drift is about a culture imagining itself. Black, white, New World, Old World, living and dead, animal and mineral, a startling array of voices perform this act of creation. Banks has captured the din, clamor, and chaos of these voices clearly and convincingly." -- John Edgar Wideman

"Grandeur...Tremendously ambitious...A powerful, disturbing study in moral 'drift,' confusion, and uncertainty." -- San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle

"Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power." -- Gail Caldwell,Boston Globe

"Russell Banks...explores the themes of good and evil, fate and freedom, success and failure, love and sex, and racism and poverty through alternating chapters focusing of dual protagonists: Bob Dubois, 30, who forsakes his dead-end job as an oil burner repairman in New Hampshire to begin a new life in Florida, and Vanise Dorsinville, a young, illiterate Haitian mother who seeks refuge from poverty by fleeing to America...Original in conception, gripping in execution." -- Newsday

"Unrelenting...A vigorous and original novel." -- New York Review of Books

Early in Continental Drift, Russell Banks compares the migrations of humanity to those of the elements: tides, winds, whole landmasses making their well-mapped, decorous circuit of the planet. One of the marvels of this book is the way it combines such an aerial perspective with particular, earthbound lives. Seen from ground level--the vantage point of most lives--this perpetual exodus has little of the bland and unimpeachable brutality of natural disaster. Instead, it can look heroic--a dogged determination to cheat entropy and death for as long as possible. This persistence, "an old-fashioned, biblical kind of heroism," powers the migratory lives in Continental Drift and makes even their eventual wreckage a source of celebration. -- The Nation, James Marcus