Davy

"DAVY is one of the very best books of its time, vivid, engrossing, sexy, funny, clear-eyed about human folly and yet deeply compassionate, a masterpiece that belongs on the exclusive short list of the three or four best After-The-Holocaust novels - and which may well be the best of them all." [Gardner Dozois] DAVY is Edgar Pangborn's classic coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of post-apocalyptic America. The world we know is gone, destroyed in a fiery cataclysm. The survivors built a new world ruled by religion, oppression, and fear. In this pre-industrial society, sickness, ignorance, and death are the norm. A bond-slave, Davy dreams of sailing to the edge of the known world. He runs away at age 14, and what he discovers is similar to what most young men find in any age. As he searches for answers to his moral questions, he becomes an educated, thoughtful man, a dangerous heretic, and finally, a rebel. *** "I was delighted all the way through." [Robert A. Heinlein] "A lovely book, a rollicking, cadenced, surprising, provocative and musical book." [Theodore Sturgeon] "Somewhere in Writer's Heaven, Edgar Pangborn and Mark Twain are conversing as equals, and this book is one of the principal reasons why. DAVY is a kind of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn for a new age that fortunately has not come to pass. This novel is Pangborn's masterpiece, one of the great works of science fiction. Over the past thirty years since I discovered it, I have often found myself having conversations with more than one of its characters, and I commend them all to you with warm pleasure." [Spider Robinson] "Pangborn represents a high watermark of optimism in American letters. His compassion and hope and faith in the human potential for goodness come through with great clarity in DAVY, which is the centerpiece of his work. In Pangborn's imagination, despair is not an option. After the inevitable comparisons with Fielding, Twain, Heinlein, and Miller, DAVY morę than anything shows that Pangborn was an original, a unique voice, one that should be read and reread and cherished." [Mark W. Tiedemann] "I loved DAVY from the moment I first read it as a boy in 1964. I loved its satire, its humor, its occasional bawdiness, its moments of joy and sadness. I loved that it took place in an after-the-apocalypse version of the upstate New York I grew up in. I loved Davy's voice, his salty language, his journey from boyhood to manhood in a colorful picaresque that so obviously and lovingly echoes Huckleberry Finn. Pangborn is one of the great lost science fiction masters, and it pleases me that this book will now have the chance to entrance another generation of readers." [John Kessel]