SOUL CATCHER
by Michael White
U.S. Publisher: William Morrow (Sept. 2007)
Adventure and romance combine in this powerful historical novel set in pre-Civil War America. A reluctant slave catcher is coerced into tracking and returning to her rightful owner a beautiful and fiercely independent runaway. In the process, he must grapple with his own conscience and the system of values under which he was raised.
A note from Richard Russo (Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist):
SOUL CATCHER is everything you said it was and then some. The characters are wonderfully rich, especially the central characters, Cain and Rosetta, but even the minor characters—the Strofes, Ebberly, John Brown—are so precisely drawn that they stay in the mind, and of course Preacher chills the blood, the perfect blend of malice and ignorance, evil reduced to its essentials.
The book will be compared to Cold Mountain of course, but White’s book is a more dramatic narrative and every bit as richly detailed and beautifully written. Cain and Rosetta’s journey is no easy passage, and that ratchets up the dramatic stakes. But while CATCHER reads like an adventure story, the book has its own impressive weight. Slavery and its effects are clearly and effectively portrayed as the worm in the American apple, and that gives Cain’s personal journey a metaphorical heft similar to Huck Finn’s. It’s an important book.
--- Richard Russo, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls
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