The Fisherman's Son: A Novel - Softcover

In the novel's present, Neil Kruger is taking his own last deadly ride. In the wake of a drug-and-illegal-immigrant landing gone seriously wrong, he's adrift on a life raft. As his hope of rescue waxes and wanes, Neil remembers his father and the whole tightly knit community of salmon fishermen in California's Half Moon Bay in the late 1950s through the 1970s. He remembers his own apprenticeship in the seagoing, fish-killing arts. He evokes the moods, the colors, the smells, the shifting energies and voices of the sea, the fish that run below the boat and fill its pit, the gulls that shriek and feast on entrails, the fundamental loneliness and great loyalty of the "huntsmen" who struggle to survive in a world that increasingly disdains their independence and discounts the product of their routinely death-defying labors. He recalls the stories his father's comrades told each other to pass the time when the Half Moon Bay boats managed to rendezvous for an evening of whiskey and cribbage far out to sea, stories that extend the past back to the earliest decades of the century, told in voices that ring absolutely true. What at first seem like random snapshots ultimately sequence themselves into a convincing narrative. Although the book has been compared to The English Patient, Koepf's style and his structure are simpler and less self-consciously literary than Ondaatje's. There are pages of seafaring action here to make your heart beat faster, moments of loss and betrayal to make it heavy, and, finally, a portrait of time, place, and people so lovingly rendered that you end up grateful to Mr. Koepf for making it. --Joyce Thompson

"The Fisherman's Son is a fine novel of the sea, absorbing in its description of men who live by, on, and, in a sense, for the sea: exalted by its beauty, hypnotized by its power, and, if they are unlucky or unwise, destroyed by its cruelty."
--Larry McMurtry

"Once we had a great tradition in American Literature of writing elegantly about work--Twain, Steinbeck, Dos Passos. With The Fisherman's Son Michael K--epf reclaims the lost art with a novel that will make you remember what we're about, where we came from, and why we love our fathers. It doesn't get any better than this."
--James Crumley, author of The Good Last Kiss