Aquarium - David Vann

'Startlingly brilliant' Spectator

'A triumph' Daily Mail

'One of America's most powerful writers' Times Literary Supplement

Twelve-year-old Caitlin lives alone with her mother - a docker at the local container port - in subsidised housing next to an airport in Seattle. Each day, while she waits to be picked up after school, Caitlin visits the local aquarium to study the fish. Gazing at the creatures within the watery depths, Caitlin is transported to a shimmering universe beyond her own.

When she befriends an old man at the tanks one day, who seems as enamoured by the fish as she, Caitlin cracks open a dark family secret and propels her once-blissful relationship with her mother towards a precipice of terrifying consequence.

David Vann was born in the Aleutian Islands and spent his childhood in Ketchikan, Alaska. He is the author of the international bestseller Legend of a Suicide - which has been translated into eighteen languages and won several prizes including the Prix Medicis Etranger - Caribou Island, Dirt, Goat Mountain and Aquarium. He is also the author of two bestselling non-fiction books, and has written for Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, the Sunday Times, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and other magazines and newspapers.

A triumph
Daily Mail

His prose is as clear, fresh and invigorating as a starry winter night on an Aleutian mountainside, and his intriguing scenarios make his books easy to devour in a few urgent sittings
The Times

A stirring tale that isn't as simple as it first appears.
Esquire

A blue-collar parable … [The character] looks back on her life as a child looks into a tank, hoping to make sense of the world inside - a theme that Vann develops beautifully, creating a mysterious realm of the wintry American city'
Guardian

Vann spins a powerful tale of guilt and resentment, steeped in the atmosphere of a bleak winter city
Mail on Sunday