The Snowfly

The Snowfly is a page-turner that takes you on a hunt through Vietnam, Soviet Russia, and a vast Canadian wasteland. The holy grail that burns at its core is the snowfly, a legendary insect--enormous, white, and exceedingly rare--that attracts trout of such size that they couldn''t possibly exist in the world as we know it. But in The Snowfly, such things can and do exist.Bowie Rhodes is a UPI reporter and a fly fisherman of extraordinary talent. He learns about the myth of the snowfly early in his childhood. Legend has it that the giant snowfly hatches every seven to ten years, never on the same river twice. It brings to rise only trout that strain the imagination--trout that are so huge they would have to have lived forty years or more; trout so wily that they never allow themselves to be caught, or even seen; trout so hungry for this fly that they will risk exposure to rise for the hatch. The snowfly is the sacred quest of only the most obsessed trout hunters, and has been seen by no living man or woman, existing only in myth and in a lost manuscript. Rhodes''s reporting brings him to the extremes of humanity--in the jungles of Vietnam, in the labyrinth of Brezhnev''s Soviet Union, in a poisoned Canadian wasteland of uranium mines. His hunt for the manuscript takes him deep into his own heart of darkness.The Snowfly is a richly imaginative and sensual novel. The world Heywood creates is broader, and more wild, with more mystery lurking beneath the surface waters than our own. Or is it? The Snowfly makes it all seem gloriously possible.