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Stay

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Overview

Aud (it rhymes with "shroud" ) Torvingen is six feet tall with blond hair and blue eyes. She can restore a log cabin with antique tools or put a man in a coma with her bare hands. As imagined by Nicola Griffith in this ferocious masterpiece of literary noir, Aud is a hero who combines the tortured complexity with moral authority.In the aftermath of her lover's murder, the last thing a grieving Aud wants is another case. Against her better judgment she agrees to track down an old friend's runaway fiancée--and finds herself up against both a sociopath so artful that the law can't touch him, and the terrible specters of loss and guilt. As stylish as this year's Prada and as arresting as a razor at the throat, Stay places Nicola Griffith in the first rank of new-wave crime writers.

Editorial Reviews

Griffith (The Blue Room; Slow River) opens her latest on the roof of a cabin in a North Carolina mountaintop forest, moving from a wide focus on a primordial wilderness to acute closeups of particular delicious sights and smells. Even before we learn the barest details about tall, blonde, singular Aud ("rhymes with shroud") Torvingen, we are seduced by her awareness, competence and her relish for the physical details of life. We learn that she has slipped off to this forest to rebuild an old cabin because she is grieving profoundly for her lover, Julia, who died in a hail of bullets. An old friend unexpectedly shows up asking for help tracking down his fiancee, who has gone missing in Manhattan, and the deft way Aud secures the cabin and travels (stopping outside of town to stow her pick-up truck and slip into an elegant Eileen Fisher outfit) reveals that this is a woman with a very sharp edge. Once Aud, a former Atlanta police officer, finds her friend's lover in a loft downtown, the action kicks into high gear and we are taken inside a character who is as brutal as she is sensitive, as wildly and exuberantly violent as she is bereaved. Yet as Griffith is enthralling us with each utterly convincing yet surprising turn, she also allows Aud to move forward emotionally. What makes Griffith's work especially satisfying and exciting is the way her extraordinary protagonist demolishes false human boundaries just as surely as she demolishes bad people. Aud is hugely complex and unique, and Griffith deserves a huge following. (Apr. 16) Forecast: This has the potential to be a breakout book for Griffith, winner of the Nebula Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award and five Lambda Awards. She already has a solid fan base, but handselling to adventurous readers (who will instantly be hooked) could take her to the next level. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith is the author of The Blue Place, Slow River, and Ammonite and has won the Nebula Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and five Lambda Awards. She is also the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape anthology series. At various times she has worked as a self-defense instructor, a rock & roll singer, a social worker, a teacher, and a laborer. She lives in Seattle.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Knopf

Filesize

681.83 KB

Number of Pages

320

eBook ISBN

9781400075614

Awards

  • Lambda Literary Awards

Excerpt from: Stay by Nicola Griffith

CHAPTER ONE

From the roof of my cabin I can see only forest, an endless canopy of pecan and hickory, ash and beech and sugar maple. Wind flows through the trees and down the mountain, and the clearing seems like nothing but a step in a great green waterfall. Even the freshly split shingles make me think of water. Cedar is an aromatic wood; warmed by the autumn sunlight of a late North Carolina afternoon, it smells ancient and exotic, like the spice-laden hold of a quinquereme of Nineveh. It would be easy to close my eyes and imagine a long ago ocean cut by oars--water whispering along the hull, the taste of spray--but there's no point. There's no one to tell, no longer a Julia to listen.

Grief changes everything. It's a brutal metamorphosis. A caterpillar at least gets the time to spin a cocoon before its internal organs dissolve and its skin sloughs off. I had no warning: one minute Julia was walking down the street, sun shining on black hair and blue dress, the next she lay mewling in her own blood. The bullet wound was bigger than my fist. Then she was on a white bed in a white room, surrounded by rhythmically pumping machines. She lasted six days. Then she had a massive stroke. They turned the machines off. The technician stripped off his gloves, and grief stripped me raw.

I set the point of a roofing nail against a shingle, lifted my hammer, and swang. The steel bit through the cedar right on a hidden imperfection, and the shingle split. The hammer shook in my fist. I put it down and laid my hands on my thighs. The shaking got worse.

A plane droned over the forest, out of sight even though the sky was clear, a hard October blue. Birds sang; a squirrel shrieked. The droning note deepened abruptly, grew louder, and resolved into a laboring car engine. There was only one road. I didn't want anything to do with visitors.

The ladder creaked under my boots, but once on the turf I moved silently. Truck and trailer were locked, and the cabin did not yet have windows to break. I collected the most valuable of the hand tools--the froe and drawing knife by the sawhorse, the foot adze and broadaxe by the sections of split cedar--stowed them in the old hogpen, and walked into the forest.

Parts of the southern Appalachian forests have been growing uninterrupted for two hundred million years. Unlike the north, this area has never been scoured to its rock bones by glaciers. It has been a haven for every species, plant and animal, that has fled the tides of ice which creep across the continent every few thousand years: the ark from which the rest of the East is reseeded after the ice melts. A refuge, my refuge.