Benediction - Softcover

Kent Haruf

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1447227530 ISBN 13: 9781447227533

Publisher: Picador, 2014

Synopsis

A story of life and death, family and community, set out on the high plains of Colorado. Dad Lewis is dying. As the residents of Holt, Colorado pass in and out of his front door to voice their farewells, their prayers, their good wishes, Dad's wife and daughter work to make his final days as comfortable as possible, knowing all is tainted by the bitterness of an absent son. In the house across the street, a young girl moves in with her grandmother and is fascinated and unsettled by the memories that Dad's condition stir up of her own family's past. And down town another new arrival, the Reverend Rob Lyle, attempts to mend strained relationships of his own, as he faces up to his latest congregation. Benediction forms - with Plainsong and Eventide - a loose trilogy set in Haruf's fictional town of Holt, an imaginative landscape which is as vivid and powerful as those of Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. Heart-breaking yet affirming, this is a novel that explores the pain, the compassion and above all the humanity of ordinary people.

About this title

Review:

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2013: Kent Haruf writes about small towns and regular people, but don’t underestimate his ambition. He is writing about life, and to do that he has returned again and again--first with Plainsong, later with Eventide--to the small town of Holt, located on the eastern plains of Colorado. In Benediction, Haruf introduces us to Dad Lewis, a 77-year-old hardware store owner who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The experience of reading Haruf is a slow burn, but as we meet the people who gather around Dad Lewis in his final days we begin to see that this is a book about community, about the things that bind us, as well as the secrets we keep to ourselves. Haruf writes with a tense, quiet realism that elevates life and death, granting both a dignity that touches on poetry. --Chris Schluep

About the Author:

Kent Haruf's honors include a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation. Plainsong won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New Yorker Book Award. He lives with his wife, Cathy, in the town of Salida in their native Colorado.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1447227530
• ISBN 13: 9781447227533
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 257