Oyster - John Biguenet

It's the mid-1950s and the Petitjeans and the Bruneaus have farmed oysters in Louisiana for hundreds of years. Bitter rivals, the two families struggle to survive, their boats mortgaged to the next harvest, their emotions soured by the grievances they pass down to their children. Now the oyster beds are threatened - and with them both families' livelihoods. The solution is a marriage between the headstrong young Therese Petitjean and Horse, the brutal patriarch of the Bruneau clan. But then a body is trawled in with the shrimp, and so begins a cycle of revenge that can only end one way . . .

OYSTER is a story of greed, passion and fierce rivalry. This is an environment in which people save themselves if they are to be saved at all.

'Biguenet uses a prose style redolent with the sense of mystery emanating from the land and from the murky bayous that litter it. The sense of place is remarkable in this outstanding first novel, and the people who inhabit it are evoked in all their primitive splendour. Recommended' IRISH TIMES