Martin Michael Driessen Book order

"[A] funny, serious, clever novel." --The New York Times From award-winning Dutch author Martin Michael Driessen comes a fearlessly funny tragedy about an improbable friendship, unstable dreams, missed opportunities, and epic coincidence. In a quiet coastal town in Yugoslavia, two men seeking more than the Communist regime can offer find their lives deceitfully entwined. Andrej is a postman in complete denial of his existence. He yearns for respect and fame but commits petty crimes for reasons he doesn't fully comprehend. Josip is an increasingly irrelevant cable car operator and unfaithfully married. Life was so much simpler when neither one knew the other's secrets. Now that they do--discovered quite by accident--each man has resorted to blackmailing the other. As their anonymous misdeeds escalate, a farce of mutual dependency begins. So does the unlikeliest of friendships when Andrej and Josip finally meet face-to-face. In a tale set against the impending wars, Martin Michael Driessen ingeniously explores the foibles of two painfully ordinary men boldly staking their claims on life.

A critically acclaimed, award-winning collection drawing sparkling prose from the inspiration of three rivers passing through different times and places. On the storm-swollen Aisne in northeastern France, an alcoholic actor combats both his demons and nature's tempests. Along the Main and Rhine in Germany, a kindhearted logger has but one wish: to travel with the lumber from his small Franconian hometown to the end of the river in the Netherlands, where it feeds into the majestic North Sea. In a bucolic vale in the French region of Brittany, two families, divided by religion and an unnamed stream, sustain a centuries-old feud, their resolve no match for the constantly shifting flow of water. These three stories span countries and eras, but they are all connected by, and reliant on, the unpredictable power and languid beauty of rivers that give life as quickly as they take it away.