The Caretaker

‘With each Ron Rash story, you expect flawed people trying desperately to survive against the odds and a rich sense of place, and images that linger, and beautiful language that you catch yourself reading over and over. What you don’t always expect is a wicked plot. The Caretaker delivers all of the above in a story that becomes a race to the finish’ - JOHN GRISHAM

‘Splendid in its evocation of time and place. [Rash] is a writer who never sets out to impress but is always impressive. There are novels you enjoy and forget. Ron Rash is one whose books always invite a second reading; they are true to life, to experience and imagination - rich treasure. The Caretaker is one of his best’ - ALLAN MASSIE

‘Thrilling … In [The Caretaker] the outcast has a heart of gold, teenage love is true love and, like the goods on display at Weaver’s Hardware, everything finds its right place’ - Times Literary Supplement

‘Hard to put down … [Ron Rash] may be regionally focused in his fiction, but his works tap deep veins of human nature and national strife’ - Independent

‘Ron Rash is a vivid chronicler of deprived rural America … There is a taut, atmospheric melodrama … at the heart of this book’ - The Times

Ron Rash is the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and New York Times-bestselling novel Serena, in addition to the critically acclaimed novels The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River and The World Made Straight; five collections of poems; and seven collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, Nothing Gold Can Stay, a New York Times bestseller, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Three times the recipient of the O. Henry Prize and winner of the 2014 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, he teaches at Western Carolina University.