“You're hooked, you feel every cut, grope up every cliff, swallow water with every spill of the canoe, sweat with every draw of the bowstring. Wholly absorbing [and] dramatic.”—Harper's Magazine

The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance.

Praise for Deliverance

“Once read, never forgotten.”—Newport News Daily Press

“A tour de force . . . How a man acts when shot by an arrow, what it feels like to scale a cliff or to capsize, the ironic psychology of fear: these things are conveyed with remarkable descriptive writing.”—The New Republic

“Freshly and intensely alive . . . with questions that haunt modern urban man.”—Southern Review

“A fine and honest book that hits the reader's mind with the sting of a baseball just caught in the hand.”—The Nation

“[James Dickey's] language has descriptive power not often matched in contemporary American writing.”—Time

“A harrowing trip few readers will forget.”—Asheville Citizen-Times

"A novel that will curl your toes . . . Dickey's canoe rides to the limits of dramatic tension."—New York Times Book Review 

"A brilliant and breathtaking adventure."—The New Yorker