When David Vann published Legend of a Suicide in 2009 he was hailed as a new voice in American literature. Alaskan-born Vann wrested his fictionalised memoir from the post 9/11 fragments of American narrative and stretched the limits of what fiction could do. His book was an exercise in existential despair which sought to pinpoint the moment when the death of his father, who committed suicide when Vann was a boy, changed his world view.

Its author went from being an unknown to a global name and in 2010 he won France’s Prix Médicis for best foreign book. The extract below is from Vann’s second novel Caribou Island and concerns the fate of seven characters struggling to find love and hold on to it within the constraints of marriage.

Monique didn’t want the quick tour. She wanted the full five-hour tour with glaciers, Prince William Sound, a lunch stop in