Carry Me Across the Water

By: Ethan Canin

Narrated by: Ron Rifkin

“Take the advice of no one,” August Kleinman’s mother says to him while August is still a young boy in Germany, and with these words to guide him, he escapes Nazi Germany and goes on to build a fortune, a family, and life on his own terms in America. At the defining moments that reveal character and shape fate — a shocking encounter with a Japanese soldier in a cave during World War II, the audacious decision to start a brewery in Pittsburgh and a violent reaction against threats to its independent success, a vacation in Barbados, during which his beloved wife mysteriously wanders off, the birth of his grandson — August’s instincts are determinative in a way that illuminates how lives unfold at the deepest levels. This is a brilliant, suspenseful, surprising novel by one of America’s finest writers. Publisher’s Weekly called Ethan Canin’s For Kings and Planets “Masterful … a classic parable of the human condition,” and the same can be said about Carry Me Across the Water.Executive Producer: Jacob Bronstein
Producer: Garet Scot
Original Jacket Design: Allison Saltzman
Original Jacket Art: Wu Li, Misty Autumn Forest at Dawn, ©Christie's Images
Author Photo: Jane Martin
©2001 by Ethan Canin
(P)2001 Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

“The most wise and beautiful novel of 2001.”—London Daily Telegraph

“Carry Me Across the Water reconfirms Canin’s stature as one of the best fiction writers of his generation.” —The Miami Herald

“A daring and heartbreaking success.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“It’s [a] testament to Canin’s mastery that he’s able to encompass the largest possible themes—life and death, war and peace, mortality and transcendence—with such elliptical precision. . . . The novel represents such a powerfully transformative experience—for protagonist and reader alike.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“A hypnotic, intricately structured, elegiac novel.” —L.A. Weekly