Perpetua's Kin

The author of the much-acclaimed #1 Indie Next Pick The Green Age of Asher Witherow returns with a masterful new work, epic in scope and yet intimate in its emotional power, about a family shaped as much by tumultuous world events as by each of its members' long-kept secrets.

Benjamin Lorn, sensitive son of an embittered Civil War veteran, comes of age in the tiny Iowa town of Perpetua where, in a single summer, he mourns the recent loss of his mother, falls in love, and uncovers a shameful family secret that sends him fleeing west. Tormented with this new knowledge, Benjamin seeks transcendence through the telegraph wires that have enchanted him since boyhood. Meanwhile the weight of a dark duty grows more and more pressing.

Thus begins Perpetua's Kin, M. Allen Cunningham's enthralling multi-generational mystery, reworking of Hamlet, and profoundly contemporary exploration of the American experience as one family embodies it. Spanning much of North America over more than a century, from the 1820s Midwest through the American south of the Civil War, to World War II San Francisco, Cunningham's novel is a powerful portrait of this nation's violent heritage, our vulnerability to the vastness of our own geography, our chronic restlessness and desire for regeneration through technology, and the impossibility of escaping the history that forms us and, always, demands a reckoning.

M. Allen Cunningham is the author of the novels The Green Age of Asher Witherow, Lost Son, and Partisans, as well as the short story collection Date of Disappearance, an essay collection entitled The Honorable Obscurity Handbook, and an illustrated work of cultural criticism entitled The Flickering Page. He edited and wrote the introduction for Funny-Ass Thoreau. His work has been shortlisted for the Indie Next Book of the Year Award, a Finalist for the Flann O'Brien Award, a Semi-finalist for the American Short Fiction Prize, and has appeared in many national and regional literary outlets including The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Tin House, Alaska Quarterly Review, Catamaran, Boulevard, and Epoch. The recipient of multiple fellowships, as well as residencies at Yaddo, Cunningham is a contributing editor for the literary journal Moss. He teaches creative writing in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere.