Cowan has excelled himself with this brilliant and poignant book - Lucy McDonald, Sunday Express
'Immensely powerful' The Bookseller
'Andrew Cowan tackles the big subjects of love and loss, working backwards and forwards from the still, shocked point of a child's death and constructing a book that is unremitting but rewarding...The book begins and ends in wintry east-coast light but keeps alive the hope of human contact and warmth' Stephen Blanchard, Time Out
Riveting ... Andrew Cowan conveys the experience of loss with an extraordinary, aching precision - Alan Mahar, Literary Review
Haunting and heartbreaking ... Cowan's beautifully compact writing keenly evokes absence, the delineation of which has been known to elude the finest authors - Sunday Times
'Andrew Cowan takes a risk with this quietly audacious first-person narrative of love and loss...the life story he addresses directly to his five-year-old son, Euan, is told with a tenderness and detail that shine through all his dark domestic secrets. CRUSTACEANS is a bleakly beautiful novel...The carefully weighted prose, with a firm physicality and groundedness of detail reminiscent of early Seamus Heaney, takes us back and forth through the narrator's messy personal history...Although a grimmer story than Cowan's COMMON GROUND (1996), CRUSTACEANS marks a significant advance. It is a mature novel with a dist