Caribou Island is the second novel from David Vann, whose groundbreaking first book, Legend of a Suicide, has become a best-seller around the world and has just won the 2010 Prix Medicis Etranger. It will be broadcast just after publication.

Caribou Island is again set in Vann's native Alaska, amid the icy, glacier fed lakes and the remote islands covered in alder and Sitka spruce. And it is on such island, far from any habitation, that Gary, a medievalist who fled to Alaska thirty years ago with his young wife Irene, in search of an idyll, is now determined to begin once again. He will build a simple cabin there and at last find peace. Irene joins him in his endeavour but there are costs.
Meanwhile her daughter Rhoda dreams of marriage with Jim, a dentist, who is about to enter his own 'mid-life crisis'.

Fluid, often funny and sometimes raw, David Vann explores the depths an unravelling marriage can sink to and the hopes the young still entertain.

In the first episode of Caribou Island Gary and Irene load up with logs and set out to build their own piece of paradise.
The reader is William Hope
The abridger is Sally Marmion
The producer is Di Speirs.
Caribou Island is published by Viking. Show less