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Benediction
Kent Haruf
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Description for Benediction
Paperback. Following the astonishing Plainsong and Eventide, this is Haruf's third novel set in the imaginary landscape of Holt, Colorado. One long last summer for Dad Lewis in his beloved town, Holt, Colorado. Num Pages: 272 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 192 x 125 x 17. Weight in Grams: 184.
Shortlisted for the Folio Prize
'Unforgettable' – Anne Tyler
'Stunningly original' – Guardian
One long last summer for Dad Lewis in his beloved town, Holt, Colorado. As old friends pass in and out to voice their farewells and good wishes, Dad's wife and daughter work to make his final days as comfortable as possible, knowing all is tainted by the heart-break of an absent son. Next door, a little girl with a troubled past moves in with her grandmother, and down town another new arrival, the Reverend Rob Lyle, attempts to mend strained relationships of his own.
Utterly ... Read morebeautiful, and devastating yet affirming, Kent Haruf's Benediction explores the pain, the compassion and the humanity of ordinary people.
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Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
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About Kent Haruf
Kent Haruf's honours 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. Benediction was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. He died in November 2014, at the age ... Read moreof seventy-one. Show Less
Reviews for Benediction
"The precious ordinary," is the central concern of this remarkable book. Benediction is quiet and nearly uneventful, but it is also unforgettable . . . In the very best sense, it is an old-fashioned novel-virtuous and kind-hearted, dealing with issues that are timeless
Anne Tyler In Benediction, a fine contender for the inaugural Folio Prize, Kent Haruf's beautifully spare ... Read moreprose charts the events of that summer with unpretentious aplomb . . . Sensual descriptions of landscape and weather create an impression of timelessness
Daily Telegraph
Haruf handles human relationships with fierce, reticent delicacy, exploring rage, fidelity, pity, honour, timidity, the sense of obligation . . . his courage and achievement in exploring ordinary forms of love - the enduring frustration, the long cost of loyalty, the comfort of daily affection - are unsurpassed by anything I know in contemporary fiction . . . A stunningly original writer in a great many ways . . . He's careful to get the story right. And it is right, it's just right; it rings true
Guardian
I wrote to Kent Haruf to tell him how much I liked his novels, for the precision of his vocabulary, for the grace that runs through his books, and for the realism . . . I thought, I wrote, of Laura Ingalls Wilder overlaid with Cormac McCarthy. American Wild implies loss, as well as exhilaration, and danger. All of that is there in Haruf, along with a measure of grace and peace of mind
Sigrid Rausing
Independent
A brilliant end to his brilliant Plainsong trilogy.
Lucy Mangan
Stylist
Kent Haruf describes Dad Lewis's last summer with beautiful simplicity . . . Haruf's existing fans have been waiting patiently for Benediction for years. They won't be surprised by how fine this book is, but newcomers to his writing will be reaching for his previous novels to catch up.
Sunday Express
In spare, Cormac McCarthy-like prose, Kent Haruf writes about facing death in modern America.
Independent on Sunday
Haruf is the master of what one of his characters calls "the precious ordinary". . . . With understated language and startling emotional insight, he makes you feel awe at even the most basic of human gestures.
Ben Goldstein
Esquire
Benediction is as richly laced with metaphysics as its title suggests . . . The most affecting moments of this supremely graceful novel are conjured by farewells to the quotidian.
Times Literary Supplement
Benediction suggests there’s no end to the stories Haruf can tell about Holt or to the tough, gorgeous language he can summon in the process.
New York Times
Truly showcases the novel as an art form.
Psychologies
We’ve waited a long time for an invitation back to Holt, home to Kent Haruf’s novels. . . He may be the most muted master in American fiction [and] Benediction seems designed to catch the sound of those fleeting good moments [with] scenes Hemingway might have written had he survived.
Ron Charles
Washington Post
His finest-tuned tale yet. . . . There is a deep, satisfying music to this book, as Haruf weaves between such a large cast of characters in so small a space. . . . Strangely, wonderfully, the moment of a man's passing can be a blessing in the way it brings people together. Benediction recreates this powerful moment so gracefully it is easy to forget that, like [the town of] Holt, it is a world created by one man.
John Freeman
The Boston Globe
Reverberant… From the terroir and populace of his native American West, the author of Plainsong and Eventide again draws a story elegant in its simple telling and remarkable in its authentic capture of universal human emotions.
Brad Hooper
Booklist
Haruf is maguslike in his gifts. . . to illuminate the inevitable ways in which tributary lives meander toward confluence. . . . Perhaps not since Hemingway has an American author triggered such reader empathy with so little reliance on the subjectivity of his characters. . . . [This] is a modestly wrought wonder from one of our finest living writers.
Bruce Machart
The Houston Chronicle
Grace and restraint are abiding virtues in Haruf's fiction, and they resume their place of privilege in his new work. . . . For readers looking for the rewards of an intimate, meditative story, it is indeed a blessing.'
Karen R. Long
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
As Haruf's precise details accrue, a reader gains perspective: This is the story of a man's life, and the town where he spent it, and the people who try to ease its end. . . . His sentences have the elegance of Hemingway's early work [and his] determined realism, which admits that not all of our past actions or the reasons behind them are knowable, even to ourselves, is one of the book's satisfactions.'
John Reimringer
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
There's something of the tone of Joyce's Dubliners in Haruf's simply-told tale of elderly Dad Lewis, diagnosed with cancer and living out his last summer. An elegiac tone, of someone who has already gone, gives Haruf's prose its extraordinary dignity and humanity.
Sunday Herald
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