The Darling (55 page)

Read The Darling Online

Authors: Russell Banks

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

S
PECIAL THANKS
are owed to my assistant, Nancy Wilson, for her help with much of the research; to my agent, Ellen Levine, whose support and friendship have sustained me for, lo, these many years; and to my editor and friend, Dan Halpern, whose tact, intelligence, and trust guided me throughout the writing of this book.

Also, heartfelt thanks to Bela Amarasekaran of the Tacagama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Freetown, Sierra Leone; Sally Boysen at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; Gloria Grow of the Fauna Foundation, Chambly, Quebec; and the many other individuals around the world who have dedicated their lives to saving chimpanzees from medical experimentation, abuse as entertainers and pets, and outright extermination.

PRAISE

“Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption. I trust his portraits of America more than any other—the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it.”

—M
ICHAEL
O
NDAATJE

“Russell Banks’s twentieth-century Liberia is as hellish a place as Joseph Conrad’s nineteenth-century Congo. The only creatures that behave with humanity are the apes. A dark and disturbing book.”

—J. M. C
OETZEE

“Hannah [the narrator of
The Darling
] is a descendant of Joan Didion’s alienated, terminally detached women … and she is a relative, too, of Graham Greene’s quiet but not so innocent Americans and V. S. Naipaul’s Western war tourists, who somehow imagine they are exempt from the chaos and violence they witness in their wanderings abroad.”


New York Times

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BACK AD

THE DARLING

A Novel

ISBN 0-06-095735-2 (paperback)

ISBN 0-694-52423-9 (unabridged CD)

A political/historical thriller of terrorism, political violence, race, and cultures

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

ISBN 0-06-095673-9 (paperback)

A story of love and sex, racism and poverty, and the failures of the American dream. American dream.

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ISBN 0-06-092324-5 (paperback)

A small-town morality play that asks: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame?

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ISBN 0-06-093086-1 (paperback)

A dazzling re-creation of the political and social landscape before the Civil War.

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ISBN 0-06-093125-6 (paperback)

Thirty years of Banks’s best short fiction, including eight new stories.

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ISBN 0-06-092724-0 (paperback)

A journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal, and redemption.

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ISBN 0-06-097680-2 (paperback)

A work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines.

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