Description
When her friend Jane dies while exploring an underwater cave with her husband Rand, Marilyn takes up diving again, to honour—and outdo—her late friend. Marilyn drags Rand with her as she increasingly pushes herself far past her limits and skill level, endangering them both in their private underwater version of hell.
More than two decades after the release of her sensational, critically acclaimed collection Driving Men Mad, Blue Field marks Elise Levine’s much anticipated return to form.
PRAISE FOR BLUE FIELD
“Elise Levine’s novel Blue Field is as immersive, hyper-vivid and true as fiction ever gets. Levine swims in the alien worlds of underwater caves, gets caught up in the forceful currents of love and the fleeting, peripheral shadows of sex and death. Here are characters who need to prove something big and occasionally make terrible mistakes. This novel illuminates the murky world of fast and altering friendships; what it feels like to lose the people we love. All of this rendered in compressed prose – diamond hard, diamond bright. Fill your lungs; you are about to dive deep. Break the surface; everything glittering and changed.” —Lisa Moore, author of February
“What James Salter did in Solo Faces for mountain climbing, Elise Levine does for diving. Blue Field is full immersion—an adventure story in a literary guise, one that holds your head under the current of its gorgeous prose until you gasp. Mysterious and terrifying, this book enthralled me.” —Caroline Adderson, author of Ellen in Pieces and A History of Forgetting
“Elise Levine’s Blue Field submerged me in its exhilarating mix of language—at once visceral and beautiful, intense and immediate, moving and distant. This deep and complex narrative of loss and risk wrecked me and then rescued me with an unexpected compassion. Blue Field is an exquisite novel.” —Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody
PRAISE FOR ELISE LEVINE
“A dazzling wordsmith, a lexical tease, Levine is like a kid let loose in a leaf pile, kicking up words for the sheer joy of watching them spin.”—Toronto Star
“Reading Elise Levine is akin to a wild ride down a dark road at night … Bold and startling … Precipitous and exhilarating.”—Globe and Mail
“Taut and direct, Elise Levine’s writing compresses the distance between art and audience, drawing a reader experientially through her fiction. Levine is a visceral imagist. Her fiction renders event indistinguishable from emotion, affecting the gut as fully as the mind … The tension that Levine’s writing evokes remains unresolved, extending beyond the page of her fictions.”—Ottawa Citizen
