Swamplandia!

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Jul 26, 2011 - Fiction - 416 pages
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The bravely imagined, wildly acclaimed debut novel from the author of Vampires in the Lemon Groveabout a thirteen year old girl who sets out on a mission through magical swamps to save her family.

"Ms. Russell is one in a million.... A suspensfuly, deeply haunted book." —The New York Times


Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness.

As Ava embarks on her mission to save them all, we are drawn into a lush debut that takes us to the shimmering edge of reality.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
23
Section 3
42
Section 4
53
Section 5
67
Section 6
78
Section 7
95
Section 8
120
Section 14
225
Section 15
236
Section 16
260
Section 17
291
Section 18
311
Section 19
327
Section 20
343
Section 21
356

Section 9
125
Section 10
171
Section 11
183
Section 12
203
Section 13
213
Section 22
369
Section 23
380
Section 24
399
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

KAREN RUSSELL, a native of Miami, won the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2012 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Philadelphia.

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