National Book Award Finalist
A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.
In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.
Annie, in All The Land To Hold Us, by Rick Bass: “When something bored her, she turned away.”
Let that say more about me than any slight on this book. It’s spare and quiet, that hallmark of books set in the high plains. The dialogue is great. But it still must say something about me, because I kept turning away.
Even so, I’d eavesdrop on the McPherons and Maggie Jones all day.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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7 June, 2014:
Finished reading
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7 June, 2014:
Reviewed