The Snowfly: A Novel - Hardcover

In Praise of The Snowfly (2000, The Lyons Press): "Fly-fishing legend meets global adventure in Heywood's sparkling, ambitious novel...an engrossing bildungsroman...part Tom Robbins, part David Copperfield."--"Publishers Weekly "(Starred)"The Snowfly is as much about fishing as Moby Dick is about whaling."--"Library Journal""If The Snowfly becomes a movie, it will blast "A River Runs Through It" out of the water."--"Fly Angler's Online Book Review"."..a finely tuned plot and masterful, literary craftsmanship. It will stand with" The River Why "as the finest of its kind."--"Riverwatch""Heywood's The Snowfly is a magical whirlwind of a novel, squarely in the tradition of Tim O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato" and Jim Harrison's "Legends of the Fall"." -Howard Frank Mosher, author of "The Fall of the Year "

The Snowfly is a spellbinding novel of suspense, international intrigue, and fly fishing. 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 of 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, more wild, with more mystery lurking beneath the surface waters than our own. Or is it? The Snowfly makes it all seem gloriously possible.