A Marker to Measure Drift

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2013. On a holiday island somewhere in the Aegean Sea, Jacqueline, a young Liberian woman, fends off starvation as she survives in the aftermath of unspeakable brutality. Having escaped the horrors of Charles Taylor's regime, she builds a home of sorts in a cave overlooking the ocean. During the day, she wanders the sunny beaches offering massages to tourists, one Euro for five minutes, all the while balancing her will to live with the crushing guilt of survival. This hypnotic, lyrical and extraordinary novel tells the story of a woman existing in the wake of experiences so horrifying that she prefers homeless numbness to the psychological confrontation she knows is inevitable. It's a novel about memory. About storytelling. About how we live with what we know. Alexander Maksik is a writer of exceptional gifts, able to deliver devastatingly powerful emotion through deceptively simple, lucid prose.

About the Author :
Alexander Maksik is the author of the novel You Deserve Nothing. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper's, Tin House, Harvard Review, the New York Times Magazine, Salon and Narrative Magazine, among other publications and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is the recipient of fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and The Corporation of Yaddo. He has taught at the University of Iowa where he was the Provost's Postgraduate Visiting Writer in Fiction.

Review :
A mesmerising novel about a woman pushed to the limits of human experience. Maksik combines James Salter's gift for seductive sentences with a real mastery of character and story. A beautiful, tender piece of literature which just happens to be a page-turner too A Marker to Measure Drift is a haunting, haunted novel. Things get stripped down to essentials - food, water, where to sleep for the night, a state of solitary desperation brought on by the most profound kind of loss. Every line of this excellent novel rings true as Maksik leads us toward the catastrophe at the story's core. This is one of those books that leaves you staring into space when you finish, dazed from the sheer power of what's been said Gorgeously written, tightly wound, with language as precise as cut glass, Alexander Maksik's A Marker to Measure Drift is a tour de force. Maksik renders the soul of his heroine, a Liberian refugee, with stark honesty so that we understand both the brutality of what she has run from and the terror she experiences as she tries to build her life back. I was undone by this novel. I challenge anyone to read it and not come away profoundly changed A Marker to Measure Drift is spellbinding. In its tenderness, grandeur and austerity, it reminds us that there is no country on earth as foreign, as unreachable, as the frantic soul of another human being A moving, deeply felt and lyrical novel about past and present An excellent novel. Each sentence feels intensely crafted, hitting the right tone in what seems like the most concise way possible . . . This book captured me immediately . . . I expected to like A Marker to Measure Drift, but never thought I would become as emotionally involved as I did Alexander Maksik's second novel portrays a young Liberian woman named Jacqueline who . . . astonishes, soothes, and horrifies us with perfect efficiency, making A Marker to Measure Drift a masterpiece A haunting, poignant novel told in beautifully lyrical prose Maksik hits the mark. His writing is both stark and lyrical, subtly reflecting Jacqueline's state of mind - wary, desolate, hallucinatory, determined. Maksik's last ten pages, a masterclass in how to captivate and revolt a reader, may well be the most powerful I will read all year Alexander Maksik's first novel You Deserve Nothing received rave reviews and it looks as though this, his second, is going to be as successful. We wander around the beaches with Jacqueline, listening to her thoughts and the internal dialogue with her mother without knowing an awful lot about either of them . . . By the end of the book we know everything in one of the biggest impacting narratives I've ever read. He writes lilting prose, almost demanding to be read aloud A harrowing portrayl of the aftermath of war on a young woman A Marker to Measure Drift is a novel of such intensity that I had to put it down every so often just to catch my breath and anchor myself in my own comfortable world. Alexander Maksik skilfully engages his readers' sympathy so that we ache for a happy ending knowing that there can be none. Thought-provoking novel No novel I read this year affected me more powerfully than Alexander Maksik's A Marker to Measure Drift Poetic, often mesmerizing . . . faultlessly lyrical . . . A Marker to Measure Drift is about compassion; perhaps it's even a masterclass in compassion