“The most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America . . . a great American novel.” — James Atlas,  The Atlantic Monthly From acclaimed author Russell Banks, a masterful novel of hope lost and gained — a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream. Banks's searing tale of uprootedness, migration, and exploitation in contemporary America brings together two of the dominant realms of his fiction—New England and the Caribbean—skillfully braided into one taut narrative.  Continental Drift  is the story of a young blue-collar worker and family man who abandons his broken dreams in New Hampshire and the story of a young Haitian woman who, with her nephew and baby, flees the brutal injustice and poverty of her homeland. Continental Drift  is a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most important writers. “Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power.” - Gail Caldwell "A great American novel...a lesson in history...It is the most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America." - James Atlas, The Atlantic “An excellent novel...An important novel because of the precise manner in which it reflects the spiritual yearning and materialistic frenzy of our contemporary life. It is also an extremely skillful book, both in its writing, which is impeccable, and in the way it unfolds. . . . Always, Banks writes with tremendous knowledge, convictions, and authenticity.” - Chicago Tribune “At its deepest level, Continental Drift is about a culture imagining itself. Black, white, New World, Old World, living and dead, animal and mineral, a startling array of voices perform this act of creation. Banks has captured the din, clamor, and chaos of these voices clearly and convincingly.” - John Edgar Wideman "Russell Banks...explores the themes of good and evil, fate and freedom, success and failure, love and sex, and racism and poverty through alternating chapters focusing of dual protagonists: Bob Dubois, 30, who forsakes his dead-end job as an oil burner repairman in New Hampshire to begin a new life in Florida, and Vanise Dorsinville, a young, illiterate Haitian mother who seeks refuge from poverty by fleeing to America...Original in conception, gripping in execution." - Newsday “Unrelenting. . . . A vigorous and original novel.” - New York Review of Books A powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers, Russell Banks's Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained, and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream. Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and he received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-two.   Continental Drift By Russell Banks HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2007 Russell Banks All right reserved. ISBN: 9780060854942 Chapter One Pissed It's December 21, 1979, a Friday, in Catamount, New Hampshire. It's late in the day, windless and cold, bits of snow dropping from a dark, low sky. At this latitude at this time of year, the sun sets at three forty-five, and Catamount, a river town laid north and south between a pair of glacial moraines, settles quickly without twilight into darkness. Light simply gets replaced by cold, and the rest remains the same. A half foot of old crusty snow has covered the ground since the first week of the month, followed by days and nights of dry cold, so that the snow has merely aged, turning slowly gray in yards and on rooftops and in heaps alongside the streets, pitted and spotted along sidewalks and pathways by dogs and mottled everywhere with candy wrappers, beer cans and crumpled cigarette packs. The parking lots and sidewalks, plowed and salted weeks ago, are the color of ash, so that new snow gently falling comes as a cleansing fresh coat of paint, a whitewash that hides the old, stained and tainted world underneath. Robert Raymond Dubois (pronounced locally as "Doo-boys"), an oil burner repairman for the Abenaki Oil Company, walks slowly from the squat, dark brick garage where he has parked the company truck, walks hunched over with careful effort, like a man in a blizzard, though snow is falling lightly and there is no wind. He wears a dark blue trooper coat with a far collar, and a black watchcap. In one hand he carries a black lunchbox, in the other an envelope containing his weekly paycheck, one hundred thirty-seven dollars and forty-four cents. Dubois thinks, A man reaches thirty, a