Field Study

Rachel Seiffert, author ofThe Dark Room, powerfully evokes our need for human connectionin this dazzling and haunting group of stories. Set against immense political upheaval, or evoking the intimate struggles between men and women, parents and children, this astonishing collection charts our desire for love, our fragility, and our strength. From the title piece, in which a young biologist conceals his discoveries at a polluted river from a local woman, to the family aided by an enemy in "The Crossing," to the old man weighing his regrets in "Francis John Jones, 1924" Seiffert's acclaimed, refined prose movingly captures the lives of her characters in their most essential, secret moments.

Rachel Seiffert is the author of The Dark Room, which won a Betty Trask Award and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. She has also received a David T. K. Wong award from PEN International for her work. After spending some years in Scotland and Germany, she now lives in London with her husband and son.