"Gander shows he is keenly aware of the loneliness that imbues human suffering and sets grief alight using beautiful, tense, haunting prose. As the well-paced plot creeps ever forward, the mysterious events at the beginning of the book are slowly revealed, resulting in an incendiary denouement that comes as a relief, but one not without each character's sacrifices." -- Publishers Weekly, (starred review) "I haven't read many novels as spooky and sublime and psychologically acute as Forrest Gander's The Trace. It's the portrait of a couple in crisis and their misguided road trip through the Chihuahua desert, on the tracks of the writer Ambrose Bierce. Gander's landscapes are lyrical and precise ('raw gashed mountains, gnarly buttes of andesite'), and his study of a marriage on the rocks is as empathetic as it is unsparing." -- Robyn Creswell (The Paris Review) " is a rule-breaking work of fierce imagination and rich, associative thinking. Love, landscape, poetry, pain-these draw Gander's characters to the edge of the void. Paying attention to detail-its accumulation and its demands-is what keeps them from toppling in.

" -- John McElwee (The Oxford American).