Overview

Anton Waker travels to the island of Ischia, off the coast of Italy, and waits, for what he does not know. As his past is peeled back, layer by layer, we learn that he is not what he seems, and find that no one in his life is without a secret. Everyone Anton Waker grew up with is corrupt. His parents are dealers in stolen goods, and his first career was a partnership venture with his cousin Aria who he may still be half in love with-- selling forged passports and social security cards to illegal aliens. But Anton longs for a less questionable way of living in the world and sets out to change. By his late twenties he has reinvented himself as a successful middle manager at a water systems consulting firm when a routine corporate background check reveals that contrary to what the framed diploma on his office wall might suggest, Anton never actually attended Harvard. In the meantime, his cousin Aria who he's still half in love with--begins blackmailing him. If he doesn't do one last seemingly simple job for her, she'll tell his unsuspecting new wife that Anton's diploma is a fake. But the job proves to have profound and unexpected consequences. Elena James faces pressure of a different kind. Born and raised in the Canadian arctic, she attended college in New York on a student visa, but when she dropped out of college her visa was rendered null and void. She's been an illegal alien in New York ever since. This fact has come to the attention of Alexandra Broden, a State Department agent who's heading up the investigation into Aria's criminal activities. Elena is offered a choice: she can either cooperate in the investigation (thus betraying Anton, whom she's known for years and is falling in love with), or she'll be deported.

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9781609530426

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I was wowed by it. --Nancy Pearl on NPR's Morning Edition <br> The Singer's Gun begins like a straightforward crime thriller...But Emily St. John Mandel's new novel is something far rarer than this classic noir opening suggests. She introduces us to haunted, often fugitive individuals stranded in places from New York to Italy, from the past to the present. And her book strikes a perfect balance between introspection and action...Mandel skillfully layers and then cunningly exposes these interlocking puzzles, we gradually realize that identity fraud is at the heart of the plot and at the core of these lives...Mandel's readers...will surely appreciate the novel's decidedly grown-up denouement, a fitting conclusion to an eminently satisfying thriller. --The Washington Post Book World <br> Mandel's talent is clearly visible from the get-go....The beauty of the novel is that its key truths are those the reader arrives at on his or her own, without the help of a straight-line narrative or a dominating perspective. Instead, Mandel feeds off of our need to make connections, even when the pattern they form doesn't really exist. We start with anxiety and end with it, thrumming in the background for us to listen in - or ignore, at both cost and reward. --The Los Angeles Times <br> This is a gripping story, full of moral ambiguities, where deception and betrayal become the norm, and where the expression, a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, is lifted to new heights. --St Louis Post-Dispatch <br> A tender and astounding tour de force. --Mystery Scene <br> False personae become more authentic than those bestowed at birth in Emily St. John Mandel's metaphysical mystery novel The Singer's Gun (Unbridled), about a young man desperate to leave the shady family business and reinvent himself, and the comely illegal immigrant to whom he sells a fake passport. --Vogue.com <br> Mandel has managed to write herself under my skin. With a combination of richly

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