The Darling (55 page)

Authors: Russell Banks

BOOK: The Darling

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S
PECIAL THANKS
are owed to my assistant, Nancy Wilson, for her help with much of the research; to my agent, Ellen Levine, whose support and friendship have sustained me for, lo, these many years; and to my editor and friend, Dan Halpern, whose tact, intelligence, and trust guided me throughout the writing of this book.

Also, heartfelt thanks to Bela Amarasekaran of the Tacagama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Freetown, Sierra Leone; Sally Boysen at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; Gloria Grow of the Fauna Foundation, Chambly, Quebec; and the many other individuals around the world who have dedicated their lives to saving chimpanzees from medical experimentation, abuse as entertainers and pets, and outright extermination.

PRAISE

“Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption. I trust his portraits of America more than any other—the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it.”

—M
ICHAEL
O
NDAATJE

“Russell Banks’s twentieth-century Liberia is as hellish a place as Joseph Conrad’s nineteenth-century Congo. The only creatures that behave with humanity are the apes. A dark and disturbing book.”

—J. M. C
OETZEE

“Hannah [the narrator of
The Darling
] is a descendant of Joan Didion’s alienated, terminally detached women … and she is a relative, too, of Graham Greene’s quiet but not so innocent Americans and V. S. Naipaul’s Western war tourists, who somehow imagine they are exempt from the chaos and violence they witness in their wanderings abroad.”

—
New York Times

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