Book of the Week - Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Wells Tower is an American writer of short stories and non-fiction. He was born in Vancouver in 1973. He is the recipient of The Paris Review Discovery Prize, a Pushcart Prize and a Henfield Foundation award. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and owns a house in North Carolina. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Tower's first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in 2009, to outstanding reviews. It has recently been published by Granta in paperback, and is highly recommended. Perfect for reading when time is limited.

A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the sweat-smudged footprint on the inside of his windscreen doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily, hilariously try to reassemble themselves. His characters - marauding Vikings, washed-up entrepreneurs, and jobbing hacks on local papers - are adrift from the mainstream, confused by contemporary masculinity, angry and aimless. Combining electric prose with compassion and dark wit, this is a major debut.