'Plainsong is nothing short of a revelation' Richard Russo
Kent Haruf's honours include a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation. His novel 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.
Perfectly formed, beautifully executed.
*Mariella Frostrup*
Beautifully crafted, alive and quietly magnificent. I read it in
one mesmerising sitting. I had no choice; it wouldn't let me
go.
*Roddy Doyle*
Plainsong is nothing short of a revelation. I don't expect to read
a better novel this year. Or next, for that matter.
*Richard Russo*
So delicate and lovely that it has the power to exalt the
reader.
*New York Times*
Satisfying and warm, Plainsong is as purehearted a novel as they
come.
*Austin Chronicle*
Plainsong becomes a story of mythic proportion, and not just a
story about a small town in the American West, but a story of
universal concern. Our story.
*Boston Review*
I’ve had the delightful experience once again of becoming so
absorbed in a book that I couldn’t have slowed down if I tried. The
book is Kent Haruf ’s Plainsong, the most controlled, cohesive
novel I’ve come across in a long time. By this I mean that its
various elements – character, setting, plot, language, even the
names, even the title – all add up to a work as flawlessly unified
as a short story by Poe or Chekhov . . . At certain points I was
horrified by the austerity of the isolated lives in this story, and
yet on every page I savoured the beauty of the telling.
*Chicago Tribune*
Plainsong is a beauty, as spare and heartbreaking as an abandoned
homestead cabin, always tough but humane, never sentimental. I
loved the prose, as bright and hard as the winter sun sparkling off
a sandy snow bank; and the characters, scrubbed to their essentials
by the extremes of the Great Plains weather. It’s a story that
draws the reader like a heat mirage.
*James Crumley*
True to the country he writes about, Haruf builds his characters
out of small gestures and daily rituals, not dialogue. Theirs is a
deep language, like the rumble before an earthquake.
*L.A. Times*
[Haruf] writes with a plainspoken, hardscrabble edge that saves his
story from sentimentality. It’s a noun-and-verb-only style that’s
part Russell Banks, part Raymond Carver, but altogether his own . .
. Kent Haruf ’s splendid Plainsong succeeds beautifully. Elegant in
its simplicity, elemental in its power, it arouses deep and
hard-earned emotions.
*Newsday*
Like all the best novels, Plainsong takes you into a world that is
at once real and vividly imagined. Here is a poetry of landscape, a
tender and passionate evocation of ordinary people in majestic
country. It is a novel of the young and old, of the bonds that bind
us to each other, and written with a kind of compassion that makes
it ultimately powerfully uplifting.
*Niall Williams*
Plainsong is a well-crafted investigation into how disparate
voices, each unique and interconnected, can come together in the
most unlikely of circumstances . . . Haruf offers a fresh approach
by creating layers which intensify and deepen as the novel
progresses, alternating between each character’s life at every
chapter.
*Observer*
With deftness and precision, Plainsong orchestrates the overlapping
lives of these and other characters . . . Haruf ’s descriptions are
sublime in their exacting simplicity . . . A beautiful,
contemporary novel that reads very much like a story from another
time.
*Philadelphia Inquirer*
Holt, Colorado, a tiny prairie community near Denver, is both the
setting for and the psychological matrix of Haruf ’s beautifully
executed new novel . . . Walking a tightrope of restrained design,
Haruf steers clear of sentimentality and melodrama while
constructing a taut narrative in which revelations of character and
rising emotional tensions are held in perfect balance. This is a
compelling story of grief, bereavement, loneliness and anger, but
also of kindness, benevolence, love and the making of a strange new
family.
*Publishers Weekly*
Ken Haruf's prose murmurs a haunting melody through the intertwined
lives of a Colorado community. It is a simple tale of life, death,
love and hatred.
*The Times*
A lovely read, illuminated by sparks of spare beauty.
*Time*
It’s written in a flat, palms-on-the-table style, which effectively
suppresses what could have been sentimental in the story. Plenty to
gulp over still, though. A first-rate, old-fashioned read.
*Time Out*
Plainsong is the unisonous austere chant of a church service, and
the hundreds of thousands of fans of this book have been nothing
less than devotional in their praise of Kent Haruf.
*Times Literary Supplement*
The emotional register of Plainsong, though kept in check by
understatement and a stoic approach to the vicissitudes of life, is
powerful. And Haruf works a quiet magic in the way he fits his
characters’ lives in with the landscape and weather that surround
them.
*Washington Post Book World*
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