The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks - Softcover

Characters often crop up in more than one story, giving the setting novelistic depth, drawing us into each life. In "Queen for a Day," we meet the young children of the Painter clan of New Hampshire as their dad is abandoning their mom, who then loses her job. "They run to her and wrap her in their arms... the three of them wind around each other like snakes moving in and out of one another's coils." In "Firewood," Painter's grown children rebuff his offer of fuel for their hearth, repaying his indifference, and Banks gives us a bad-guy's-eye view of their shared loneliness. In "The Fisherman," a $50,000 lottery is won by an old ice fisherman who stashes it in a cigar box, eliciting character-revealing reactions from the trailer-park denizens. "Dis Bwoy, Him Gwan" further reveals why the local pothead Bruce Severance so urgently needs the fisherman's money. The stories resonate and illuminate each other, the dialogue is pitch-perfect, and the collection has the cohesiveness of a 500-page novel. Banks's prose has the stark grace of classical tragedy. He's a poet after all. --Tim Appelo

"Banks has the kind of God-given talent that lets him not so much invent characters as inhabit the heads of people who already exist.-- The writing is--as immediate as [the] morning headlines." --The Montreal Gazette

"As often as Banks gives them (his characters) dignity, he also dishes out pain. The Angel on the Roof doesn't offer balm, just honesty. These hard truths are what make the book shine." - Calgary Herald

"...yet Banks is also a compassionate writer, illuminating even the most despicable characters with flashes of sorrowful understanding."
- The National Post

"These stories perch on the rim of memory, that shadowy realm that makes Banks' novels like Rule of the Bone, so powerful--we [are] blessed by Banks' prodigious talent and insight." - Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 11 2000-06-28