Reservation blues

Synopsis

In the 111-year life of the Spokane Indian reservation, not one person has arrived by accident-until the day the black stranger appears with nothing more than the suit he wears and the guitar slung over his back. The man happens to be the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, in flight from the devil and presumed long dead. And when he passes his enchanted instrument to young Thomas-Builds-the-Fire-storyteller, misfit, and musician-a magical odyssey begins. From reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan, Thomas and his Coyote Springs bandmates careen through ancestral nightmares and rock-and-roll dreams, sounding chords of celebration and survival as timeless as their tribe. From Sherman Alexie, the Granta Award-winning author whose work has been hailed as "spare, disturbing...with stark lyric power" by the New York Times, comes a fresh, luxuriantly comic tale of power, tragedy, and redemption among today's generation of First Americans.