After his ill-fated pursuit of the American dream, Bob Dubois finds employment on a fishing boat off the Florida Keys where he becomes involved in a plot to smuggle two Haitians into Florida.“The most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America . . . a great American novel.”—James Atlas, The Atlantic MonthlyRussell Bank’ssearing 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 Driftis 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."In a career spanning some forty years and sixteen books of fiction, Russell Banks has established himself as our foremost chronicler of hardscrabble lives in economically depressed northern New England and upstate New York.. [he] has always written with unshowy frankness about the plain animal comforts of sex, the companionable mingling of bodies rendered unbeautiful by age and hard work and the booze and junk food that bring fleeting consolation...."-Jennifer Schuessler, The New York ReviewRussell Banksis a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has written fiction, and more recently, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature films in 1997.