Plainsong

By: Kent Haruf

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2000-08-22

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This poignant novel weaves together the lives of a high school teacher, a pregnant teenage girl, and two elderly bachelor brothers, capturing the essence of human resilience and community across four generations.

"Resonant and meaningful . . . . A song of praise in honor of the lives it chronicles [and] a story about people's ability to adapt and redeem themselves." —The Washington Post Book World

"So foursquare, so delicate and lovely . . . it has the power to exalt the reader." —The New York Times Book Review

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.