Shadow Country

Peter Matthiessen · 1927–2014 · United States

Why it matters

Multiple conflicting witnesses reconstruct the life and disputed murder of Edgar Watson, a real Everglades planter and outlaw feared across Florida's violent frontier. Matthiessen's radically condensed trilogy won the National Book Award, an unprecedented feat for reworked earlier fiction.

At a glance

Multiple unreliable narrators circle the same disputed events across nearly a thousand pages.