Matt Bondurant Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Third Translation (2005)
  2. The Wettest County in the World (2008)
  3. The Night Swimmer (2012)
  4. Oleander City (2022)

Novels Book Covers

Matt Bondurant Books Overview

The Third Translation

This is the latest novel trying to capitalize on the amazing success of The Da Vinci Code by positing an ancient mystery, contemporary scholars, rare documents, greedy collectors, and a quasi academic protagonist. In this case he’s an American Egyptologist living in London who’s got less than a week to unlock the secrets of the Stela of Paser, a funerary stone whose references to a ‘third way’ of deciphering the hieroglyphics inscribed on the stone have teased, tempted and eluded would be translators for centuries. Walter Rothschild has sacrificed a wife, a child, and many of the other things that make life worth living to pursue a passion cultivated in childhood and encouraged by his own father. Less than a week before his grant runs out and the Stela of Paser returns to its dusty baseme*nt in the British Museum, Walter is seduced and drugged by a mysterious young woman who steals a precious document from the Museum; in search of her and the papyrus scroll, Rothschild encounters a cult of would be mystics who will stop at nothing to get him to decipher the Stela and reveal its secrets especially those that promise a ‘third way’ between life and death,’the endless quest of the ancient kings.’While Walter’sefforts are admirable, he is basically a boring, fretful, and regretful man who fails to engage the reader. That’s too bad, for otherwise this is a beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and finely detailed novel based somewhat on the author’s own obsession with the Stela. But if you share his passion for Egyptology, and want a more learned discourse on its arcana than theAmelia Peabody mysteries provide, The Third Translation is well worth reading. Jane Adams

The Wettest County in the World

Based on the true story of Matt Bondurant’s grandfather and two granduncles, The Wettest County in the World is a gripping tale of brotherhood, greed, and murder. The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County, Virginia, during Prohibition and in the years after. Forrest, the eldest brother, is fierce, mythically indestructible, and the consummate businessman; Howard, the middle brother, is an ox of a man besieged by the horrors he witnessed in the Great War; and Jack, the youngest, has a taste for luxury and a dream to get out of Franklin. Driven and haunted, these men forge a business, fall in love, and struggle to stay afloat as they watch their family die, their father’s business fail, and the world they know crumble beneath the Depression and drought. White mule, white lightning, firewater, popskull, wild cat, stump whiskey, or rotgut whatever you called it, Franklin County was awash in moonshine in the 1920s. When Sherwood Anderson, the journalist and author of Winesburg, Ohio, was covering a story there, he christened it the ‘wettest county in the world.’ In the twilight of his career, Anderson finds himself driving along dusty red roads trying to find the Bondurant brothers, piece together the clues linking them to ‘The Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy,’ and break open the silence that shrouds Franklin County. In vivid, muscular prose, Matt Bondurant brings these men their dark deeds, their long silences, their deep desires to life. His understanding of the passion, violence, and desperation at the center of this world is both heartbreaking and magnificent.

The Night Swimmer

The Night Swimmer, Matt Bondurant’s utterly riveting modern gothic novel of marriage and belonging, confirms his gift for storytelling that transports and enthralls. In a small town on the southern coast of Ireland, an isolated place only frequented by fishermen and the occasional group of bird watchers, Fred and Elly Bulkington, newly arrived from Vermont having won a pub in a contest, encounter a wild, strange land shaped by the pounding storms of the North Atlantic, as well as the native resistance to strangers. As Fred revels in the life of a new pubowner, Elly takes the ferry out to a nearby island where anyone not born there is called a blow in. To the disbelief of the locals, Elly devotes herself to open water swimming, pushing herself to the limit and crossing unseen boundaries that drive her into the heart of the island s troubles the mysterious tragedy that shrouds its inhabitants and the dangerous feud between an enigmatic farmer and a powerful clan that has no use for outsiders. The poignant unraveling of a marriage, the fierce beauty of the natural world, the mysterious power of Irish lore, and the gripping story of strangers in a strange land rife with intrigue and violence The Night Swimmer is a novel of myriad enchantments by a writer of extraordinary talent.

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