Böcker av Russell Clarke

The Book of Ruth is about two sisters, Ruth Matilda Clarkson and Cora Undine Lasciter, who survive the trials of a challenging childhood and a demanding father in 1940s America and then find themselves swept up in the powerful currents of the men who come into their lives.Ruth, the older, whose life is a sort of modern-day parody of her namesake, Ruth the Moabite of the Old Testament, marries a young man she meets at college, the enigmatic Richard Clarkson, a man controlled by his appetites and unending desires, and leaves her family in St. Louis and moves to the rural town of Ox Bend, Missouri, where she becomes part of the Clarksons' family-run funeral business. After they have been married only a few months, Ruth's family, attempting to avoid a scandal, asks her to adopt her sister's illegitimate child, Aaron, who turns out to be a special-needs child who ultimately transforms Ruth's life in ways she never thought possible, even after his death in 1990.Her estranged sister, Cora Lasciter, a beautiful, impetuous, free-spirited woman and a survivor of sexual abuse, gives birth to a child, Aaron, at age seventeen, signs over her parental rights to her sister, and then moves from relationship to relationship as she struggles with the demons from her past. Years later, when she attends Aaron's funeral, the two sisters, bound by their connection to the child, gradually rebuild their filial connection, and together they face the pains of infidelity, the loss of love, and the vicissitudes of old age.It's an uplifting survival story of two very different women connected by the unbreakable bond of sisterly love, unending faith, and the innocent truth and unfiltered love of a child who brings them back together, and represents the possibility of love, forgiveness, and ultimate redemption.

On March 26, 1982, two men in a mysterious black pick-up truck brutally attack two bikers on the deserted bluff roads just across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Louis. One biker is killed instantly and the other is severely injured, and the lives of the four men are indelibly changed and linked together, forever.A Change of Season accounts the final days of each of the men involved in this tragic confrontation and examines the philosophical and existential impact that such an immeasurable event had on each of their lives.Craig Lerrib, the main antagonist, leads a life of unexamined indifference and unending carnal exploration and ends up morally bankrupt and alone, a reality that permanently alters all those who are caught in the dangerous pull of his orbit.His partner in the black truck, Peter Doyle, a thoughtful man swept along by his desires, spends his life suppressing the guilt he feels for his part in the murder, as well as his own true sexual feelings, a process that leads to great existential searching and self-awareness, but also unrelenting loneliness and life-long isolation.Alfred Whitman, the surviving rider, is never quite able to get past the physical impairments sustained in the attack, and he attempts to authenticate in the sterile world of pen and paper what was lost in the physical world of living, a corridor that leads to existential angst and unresolved religious questioning.And in one last tribute, Alfred Whitman pens a short story in homage to the enigmatic young rider who lost his life that day, Thale, who, although dying at an early age, becomes the true protagonist of the novel and represents the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation that the other characters are lacking.In a larger sense, A Change of Season examines the relationships and associations that we make as humans through the restricted prism of our own beliefs, and then explores how these "connections" struggle for survival in a world of endless opposing ideologies. A philosophical process of discovery as mysterious, and in some ways, as unknowable as the very setting of it all, the Mississippi River.