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Our souls at night book plot haruf11/13/2023 ![]() ![]() Like the friendly light shining from Addie's window, Haruf’s final novel is a beacon of hope he is sorely missed.” -Francesca Wade, Financial Times “Haruf is never sentimental, and the ending-multiple twists packed into the last twenty pages-is gritty, painful and utterly human. His novels are imbued with an affection and understanding that transform the most mundane details into poetry. I recommend reading it straight through, then sitting in quiet reflection of beautiful literary art.” -Fred Ohles, The Lincoln Journal Star “By turns amusing and sad, skipping-down-the-sidewalk light and pensive. ![]() The story speeds along, almost as if it's a page-turning mystery.” -Joseph Peschel, The St. “A fine and poignant novel that demonstrates that our desire to love and to be loved does not dissolve with age. “Elegiac, mournful and compassionate.a triumphant end to an inspiring literary career a reminder of a loss on the American cultural landscape, as well as a parting gift from a master storyteller.” -William J. Haruf’s story accumulates resonance through carefully chosen details the novel is quiet but never complacent.” - The New Yorker “A delicate, sneakily devastating evocation of place and character. He has given us a powerful, pared-down story of two characters who refuse to go gentle into that good night.” -Lynn Rosen, The Philadelphia Enquirer As a meditation on life and forthcoming death, Haruf couldn’t have done any better. “A fitting close to a storied career, a beautiful rumination on aging, accommodation, and our need to connect. “Lateness-and second chances-have always been a theme for Haruf. But here, in a book about love and the aftermath of grief, in his final hours, he has produced his most intense expression of that yet. Packed into less than 200 pages are all the issues late life provokes.” -John Freeman, The Boston Globe spare but eloquent, bittersweet yet hopeful.” -Kurt Rabin, The Fredericksburg Freelance-Star The novel is a plainspoken, vernacular farewell.” -Catherine Holmes, The Charleston Post and Courier Haruf's fiction ratifies ordinary, nonflashy decency, but he also knows that even the most placid lives are more complicated than they appear from the outside. “More Winesburg that Mayberry, Holt and its residents are shaped by physical solitude and emotional reticence. Ron Charles of the Washington Post called it "a tender, carefully polished work that it seems like a blessing we had no right to expect."ġ999 - Finalist for the 1999 National Book Award for PlainsongĢ005 - Finalist for the Book Sense Award for EventideĢ014 - Folio Prize shortlist for Benediction Our Souls at Night, his final work, was published posthumously in 2015 and received wide praise. On November 30, 2014, at the age of 71, Kent Haruf died at his home in Salida, Colorado, of interstitial lung disease. Library Journal described the writing as "honest storytelling that is compelling and rings true." Jonathan Miles saw it as a "repeat performance" and "too goodhearted." The New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg called it "a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader." Plainsong won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.Įventide, a sequel to Plainsong, was published in 2004. Plainsong was published in 1999 and became a U.S. A number of his short stories have appeared in literary magazines. Where You Once Belonged followed in 1990. His first novel, The Tie That Binds (1984), received a Whiting Award and a special Hemingway Foundation/PEN citation. He had three daughters from his first marriage.Īll of Haruf's novels take place in the fictional town of Holt, in eastern Colorado, a town based on Yuma, Colorado, one of Haruf's residences in the early 1980s. He lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado until his death in 2014. He graduated with a BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965, where he would later teach, and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.īefore becoming a writer, Haruf worked in a variety of places, including a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Denver, a hospital in Phoenix, a presidential library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, as an English teacher with the Peace Corps in Turkey, and colleges in Nebraska and Illinois. Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, the son of a Methodist minister. Education-B.A., Nebraska Wesleyan University M.F.A., Iowa Writers' WorkshopĪlan Kent Haruf was an American novelist and author of six novels, all set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.
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