More LOVE for The Manager
"Shaw’s characters pop off the page. His range and authority are formidable."
"I loved it. Abbey meets Vonnegut." Bill McKibben
"The Manager is Shaw at his best. Fast-paced with dramatic twists and turns that keep you hooked to the very end, the story is a rich tapestry of fact, fancy, and colorful characters that is woven so artfully and convincingly into the Olympic region of the Adirondacks that locals will feel right at home in it. You will love this book; enjoy the ride!" - Dr. Curt Stager, Still Waters, Your Atomic Self
"A thoroughly engaging romp. The Manager had my full attention at the first paragraph and the pace never flagged. I loved the raffish Saranac Lake characters and atmosphere and the send-up of the Olympic madness, with an overlay of Russian spies and double agents. It completely grounds the Montreal, New York City, and Sarajevo settings. Olga is ravishing and mysterious. The narrator is sympathetic and off-kilter enough to be continually interesting. And the manager is sinister and Zelig-like without being entirely unlikeable." - John Ernst, co-owner Elk Lake Lodge
“The Manager is one of those rare novels that grabs you, pulls you into a desperate but touching spiral, where reality, as invented history that could be true, collides with poetry – which is there on every page of this crisp, elegant, beautifully written book, which summons the Adirondacks in a way only Chris Shaw can. I should warn readers about starting this book, as it will hold them in thrall to the last page, where the poignant voice of Anna Akhmatova offers some consolation by naming this ‘brutal and coarse world,' from which even God cannot extricate Shaw's deeply memorable and deeply implicated characters." - Jay Parini, Borges and Me
"And I thought Chris Shaw's The Power Line was nervy! For confidence and range, Shaw's new caper, The Manager, strides from the Adirondacks to Montreal, Bosnia, and Innu territory in Quebec. But always the needle swings resolutely home to Lake Placid and Shaw's beloved Adirondacks. The Manager's feisty mavericks might just be doing for the Adirondacks what John D. MacDonald did for Florida with his great Travis McGee series -- giving it a sound, a beat, a social culture all its own." - Amy Godine, The Black Woods
"The Manager is a wonder – at once a propulsive and suspenseful Cold War procedural and a marvelously detailed account of life in the Adirondacks circa 1980, a wild landscape seamed with unexpected pathways and collisions. Shaw’s characters pop off the page. His range and authority are formidable. He weaves hockey, geopolitics, smalltown journalism, sexual desire, and Russian poetry together in unexpected ways, their connections and loyalties so intricately knotted you’ll be teasing out their implications long after the last page has been turned." - Robert Cohen, The Varieties of Romantic Experience, Inspired Sleep
"Chris Shaw is the William Kennedy of the north of Albany." - Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow, The Family