Continental Drift

By: Russell Banks

Narrated by: Zach Villa

“The most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America . . . a great American novel.”— James Atlas, The Atlantic Monthly

From acclaimed author Russell Banks, a masterful novel of hope lost and gained—a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.

Banks's searing 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 Drift is 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.

Continental Drift is a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most important writers.

Excellent novel

Emotional and heartbreakingly beautiful novel. This novel had me in tears one moment and laughing the next.

Very good story and performance

Some of the other commenters said this didn’t flow very well as an audio book, but I disagree. I thought it was excellent overall, and enjoyed the narration.

A Favorite writer fizzles

Hard to believe that Banks wrote this tedious tale. The parts that involve the struggling working class family that packs it in and moves to Florida, is engrossing and realistic but the part that starts following Haitian culture, characters and plot twists bored the pants off me. The book became its own metaphor: drift, drift, drift.

A better book to read than listen to.

Russell Banks is one of my favorite authors and I was looking forward to listening to this, but as an audiobook, I found the story too dense to cross mediums. What is normally a treat to read as you build the world word by word at your pace, becomes burdensome as you are forced to build it at the narrators pace and that just wasn’t fun for me.
Headed to the book store for a hard copy!!

Give up and die

TOTALLY without value and extremely depressing. Portrays life as hopeless and that it's futile to pursue change.