Eventide

Following the astonishing Plainsong, Eventide is Kent Haruf's second novel set in his imaginary landscape of Holt, Colorado.Harold and Raymond McPheron are finally waving goodbye to their beloved Victoria, a young mother with a first chance at an education. Betty and Luther Wallace are struggling to keep their heads above water and their children out of care, and in the same town young friends Dena and DJ find solace away from their own troubled homes. As these stories unfold and entwine, tragedy strikes the McPheron household and life is thrown irrevocably off course. Heart-breaking yet hopeful, Kent Haruf's Eventide is an unflinching depiction of the hardships of small-town life, lit up by astonishing moments of redemption.

Possesses the haunting appeal of music, the folksy rhythms of an American tale and the lovely, measured grace of an old hymn., Wonderful . . . peopled with individuals whose ordinary lives are invested with epic quality and truth., This is a novel that succeeds in affirming life without ducking its hardships., Two taciturn bachelor brothers, a dim-bulb couple living in a trailer, a quiet preteen boy living with his grandfather, a social worker, and a young mother abandoned by her husband . . . The plain truth is you can’t stop reading or caring about them., Haruf’s laconic style – with nouns as strong and upright as fenceposts, the verbs as clean and sharp as razor wire – creates a richly symphonic effect . . . In creating a place whose people are tethered to each other by history and emotion as much as place, Haruf’s work is now competing with Faulkner’s Mississippi.

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 of seventy-one.