A first novel of considerable maturity: powerful, original, cunningly constructed, and timely. --Julian Barnes, author of The Sense of an Ending

After years alone in a cell, an aging prisoner is released without explanation, expelled into a great city now utterly unfamiliar to him. Broken by years of brutality at the hands of the prison guards, he scrounges for scraps, sleeping wild, until a museum curator rescues him from an assault. The museum has just opened its most controversial exhibit: a perfect replica of the marshes, an expansive wilderness still wracked by conflict. There the man had spent years as a doctor among the hated and feared marshmen, who have been colonized but never conquered.
Then Marshlands reveals one of its many surprises: it is written in reverse. The novel leaps backward once, twice, returning to the marshes and unraveling time to reveal the doctor's ambiguous relationship to the austerely beautiful land and its people. As the pieces of his past come together, a great crime and its consequences begin to take shape. The true nature of the crime and who committed it will be saved for the breathtaking ending--or, rather, for the beginning.
In the tradition of Wilfred Thesiger's The Marsh Arabs and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, Marshlands explores a culture virtually snuffed out under Saddam Hussein, and how we cement our identities by pointing at someone to call other. Elegant, brief, and searing, Matthew Olshan's Marshlands shivers with the life of a fragile, lost world.

Imagine a modern-day retelling of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with a teenage girl and a very pregnant young Mexican as the main characters. That's the gist of Matthew Olshan's brilliant literary debut, Finn: A Novel.The book's narrator is Chloe Wilder, a quiet girl, part tomboy, part survivor. Rescued from a murderous life with her mother, Chloe lives with her grandparents in the cocoon of a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. For the first time in her life, things are steady, safe--and stifling.Enter Silvia Morales, the grandparents' maid. Silvia is an illegal immigrant, but that's not her only secret: She's also pregnant, a transgression which gets her kicked out of the house. Not long after, Chloe is torn from her quiet life, too, and forced to live on the run.While Finn is about Chloe and Silvia's comic mishaps--and their brushes with real danger--on the road, it's also a dark portrait of modern America, where smug suburbanites live minutes away from the wilderness of inner cities, and once-mighty rivers meander under superhighways.Finn has been approved for ninth-grade English use statewide by the South Carolina Department of Education (2004). It's required for all high school college prep freshmen (2009).It was named one of LA's Best 100 Books for 2001 by the Los Angeles Unified School District.Finn was a finalist for the Michal L. Printz Award and the Booklist Editor's Choice Award, and it was considered for the PEN/Faulkner. It was nominated for YALSA Quick Picks (for reluctant teen readers) and for Best Book of 2001) by Bookreporter.com.It was selected Best Children's Book of 2001) by Plymouth Library, Plymouth, MI, and voted Book of the Month by Lake Mills, Wisconsin Library (2002).It was placed on the 2002 Summer Reading List for Lovett School in Atlanta, GA, and also on the Summer Reading List at Westside High School in Mason, GA.

Imagine a modern-day retelling of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with a teenage girl and a very pregnant young Mexican as the main characters. That's the gist of Matthew Olshan's brilliant literary debut, Finn: A Novel. The book's narrator is Chloe Wilder, a quiet girl, part tomboy, part survivor. Rescued from a murderous life with her mother, Chloe lives with her grandparents in the cocoon of a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. For the first time in her life, things are steady, safe--and stifling. Enter Silvia Morales, the grandparents' maid. Silvia is an illegal immigrant, but that's not her only secret: She's also pregnant, a transgression that gets her kicked out of the house. Not long after, Chloe is torn from her quiet life too, and forced to live on the run. While Finn is about Chloe and Silvia's comic mishaps--and their brushes with real danger--on the road, it's also a dark portrait of modern America, where smug suburbanites live minutes away from the wilderness of inner cities, and once-mighty rivers meander under superhighways.