The Final Case - A novel

Informationen zum Autor David Guterson Klappentext From the award-winning, bestselling author of Snow Falling on Cedars —a moving father-son story that is also a taut courtroom drama and a bold examination of privilege, power, and how to live a meaningful life. "Ultimately, the mystery at the center of The Final Case is not about innocence or guilt, but about how one family’s profound attachments can stand alongside breathtaking cruelty in another.” —Scott Turow, The New York Times Book Review A girl dies one late, rainy night a few feet from the back door of her home. The girl, Abeba, was born in Ethiopia. Her adoptive parents, Delvin and Betsy Harvey—conservative, white fundamentalist Christians—are charged with her murder. Royal, a Seattle criminal attorney in the last days of his long career, takes Betsy Harvey’s case. An octogenarian without a driver’s license, he leans on his son—the novel’s narrator—as he prepares for trial. So begins The Final Case , a bracing, astute, and deeply affecting examination of justice and injustice—and familial love. David Guterson’s first courtroom drama since Snow Falling on Cedars , it is his most compelling and heartfelt novel to date. Leseprobe Pretrial A while back, I stopped writing fiction. I’ve been doing it for a long time, I’m not interested anymore, there are other things in life, I’d be repeating myself—­I became aware that thoughts like these, uninvited, unexpected, persistent, and gnawing, were proliferating in my head, and outweighed any urge to write fiction, at first by a little, so that I stayed in the habit, but then by a lot, so that I quit. It was a strange development for me. My situation was unfamiliar. Perplexed at first, I puttered and tinkered. I read books long unread. I took walks that might aptly be described as putting one foot in front of the other while trying not to forget that it was time to change a furnace filter. I swam laps with my wife every Tuesday and Thursday morning in a public pool. About once a week, we went to see a movie; about twice a week, we ate lunch in a café. My life clearly smacked now of bourgeois retirement. Predominantly, I cleaned, organized, repaired, and refurbished, and so the weeks went past without any fiction writing. Some days, I was distressed to learn that it was noon already, but this perturbation, from the start, was mild, a pang at worst, or an ephemeral hollowness. More persistent was a vague intimation that, at the heart of every moment of living, something was wrong. That faded, until I was waking up each morning without giving fiction writing any thought or missing it. Fiction writing was behind me in full. There were other possibilities now. If that leaves you wondering about this book—­wondering if I’m kidding, or playing a game, or if I’ve wandered into the margins of metafiction or the approximate terrain of autofiction—­everything here is real. One October Sunday afternoon, after I’d headed four rows of raspberry canes that still had leaves but were shedding them as I culled, my father called me. Two things, he said. First, a tree had fallen in his yard. Second, he’d had a minor car accident. The downed tree, while a nuisance, could wait indefinitely. The accident, though, was a problem, because his car was undrivable and he had to be at work in the morning. “No,” he said, “I didn’t get hurt. No one got hurt. That’s on the bright side. On the downside, I’m at fault. I know that. I can’t blame someone else. I plowed into a parked car. I turned a corner and plowed into a car, and I sat there thinking, ‘I know what this means. It’s the beginning of the end for me.’ “Your mother,” my father went on, “had a series of parking-­lot scrapes, and then a serious fender bender, and the result is, for about two years now, she hasn’t gotten behind the wheel of a car, which you kn...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: David Guterson
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 29.11.2022
• EAN: 9780525563112
• ISBN: 978-0-525-56311-2
• Pagine: 272
• Dimensioni: 130 mm x 203 mm x 28 mm
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi