'The detail is breathtaking, her ar for dialogue matchless, her observation unsentimental, her pace infectious. She tackles death, sex and the gruesome with black hillarity and the skills of a born storyteller. Rich anf dense, Accordion Crimes is a splendid novel.' The Times This is the story of a green, two-row button accordion. Brought to America by its Sicilian maker in 1980, it survives a century and traverses a continent. The accordion's musix resounds around the Cajun bayoux; notes drift out of a lonely Chicago tenement. A French-Canadian orphan struggles to master the battered instrument left behind by his parents,searching for a lost past. Whether given, sold or stolen, the accordion passes through the hands of a host of unlucky owners who embody the hopes, hardships and passions of immigrant life in twentieth-century America. Utterly original, Proulx's novel stays in the mind like an old song and tugs at the memory like a half- forgotten tune..--Back cover