Tom Connor's Gift

In his fifth novel, and the final in his Homecoming Trilogy (Hunger in America, and Ben Armstrong's Strange Trip Home) David Allan Cates writes the story of a recently widowed doctor who has fled her job and Wisconsin home to hole up in a Montana cabin on the Eastern Front of the Rocky mountains, where she seeks understanding from an unexpected source: a cache of letters written by an old boyfriend, Tom Connor. In her grief, she sees with new eyes  Tom's wandering life and traumatic experiences in Central America during the war years. The two narratives--Tom's tragic life, and her own long marriage to her husband--reveal how sometimes we can only see when we are ready to see. Tom Connor's Gift shines a light on the transformative act of storytelling itself, and is destined to be received as one of the most important novels of the year.

David Allan Cates's Tom Connor's Gift is extraordinary. The prose is ravishing, the characters are surprising and irresistible, and many of its scenes are so intensely moving that they bring tears of gratitude and pleasure. The book praises long marriage and long friendship, but what I especially appreciate about its vision is how sexually liberating it is for both men and women. Cates is a fierce and fearless writer! One finishes this novel feeling wiser, more alive, and spiritually refreshed.
David Huddle
Sadness and madness, grief and delirium. Tom Connor's Gift delivers us precious monsters: our first true love and our true lasting love. Coursing between anecdote and musing, this is a novel only grownups can understand. It is smart and ecstatic and will break your goddamn heart.
Bryan Di Salvatore
David Allan Cates evokes the human heart out of the landscape, blending the two with so much subtlety and skill that the very world in this novel shimmers with yearning. Tom Connor is as complex and fascinating a character as I have read in contemporary fiction, and Cates has an uncanny ability to evoke the beautiful and terrifying, the feverish and gritty Central American world Connor travels through. Tom Connor's Gift is a journey into the heart of two continents-and the continent of the human heart-an exploration of dissolution and loyalty, naiveté and cynicism, grief and renewal. In this novel, they all find their place.
Kent Myers
Tom Connor's Gift is the gift we all seek, the gift of love in the face of grief, violence, loss, and heartbreak. In a deeply felt and vividly told story, David Cates connects the interior lives of a farm woman in the wilderness grieving her husband's death and her long-lost lover-a wandering man torn by the beauties and terrors of Central America.
Annick Smith
Tom Connor's Gift is a fearless and instructive odyssey into the rustic places of the heart that still baffle and dictate our lives.
Rick DeMarinis
Tom Connor's Gift is a gift all right-hilarious and moving-a two for one: two voices, two stories, two struggles to come to terms with love and longing, in prose that is vivid, urgent, brave, and true.
Dinah Lenney
Put a widow in a cabin at the edge of Montana's Rocky Mountain Front with nothing but memories and a marauding bear outside to keep her company and what do you get? A tenderly-told tale of grief, recovery, and a message of love from the past. David Allan Cates's Tom Connor's Gift is indeed a gift to readers looking for a novel that will ask them to slow down and think about questions like "How do we endure suffering? And how-when life has flung us far and wide-how do we get home again?"
David Abrams
Tom Connor's Gift is a wonderful book, standing on its tiptoes, stretching out its fingers to brush against a magical realism that is transformative.
Mark Metcalf