Well - Matthew McIntosh

Set in a working-class suburb of Seattle, Matthew McIntosh's devastatingly beautiful first novel charts the lives of a vast cast of characters grappling with dark compulsions and heartrending afflictions. Lost in the Well - that dark, barren wasteland of the heart and mind - they search for escape, transcendence, for a vehicle up into the light they know is outside.

Well is a novel for the new century - a testament of a weary people living out the end of an age.

'McIntosh is the real thing - a tremendously gifted and supple prose hand, recounting all manner of human distress and extremity in an assured and generous voice, balancing, as all honest practitioners of the fictional art must, the delicately pitched forces of fate, remorse and grace . . . a kind of post-industrial update of the similarly hopeless small-town lives Sherwood Anderson depicted in his similary composed 1918 novel, Winesburg, Ohio . . . an astonishingly sharp and satsifying debut.' Washington Post