The ones in between have motivations mysterious even to themselves, and they take the abuse of the villainous and the generosity of the saintly all in stride. The bad guys are drunk and bored and mean the good guys are honest and hard-working. Plainsong is set in Holt, Colorado, on the rough, rugged, outstretched plains east of Denver and is infused with its landscape. 'A work as flawlessly unified as a short story by Poe or Chekhov.On the plains the sky is bigger and the wind blows harder and this tends to make people some combination of humble, hearty, and resilient as hell. 'A moving look at our capacity for both pointless cruelty and simple decency, our ability to walk out of the wreckage of one family and build a stronger one where that one used to stand.' -Jeff Giles, Newsweek The story itself-spare, unsentimental, rooted in action-honors the values of the community it describes.' -Lisa Michaels, Haruf has shaped a place of enormous goodness. 'If the novelist invents a world, then Mr. 'Haunting, virtuosic, inimitable.' -Sarah Saffian, San Francisco Chronicle 'A work as flawlessly unified as a short story by Poe or Chekhov.' -Jon Hassler, Chicago Tribune his sheer assurance as a storyteller, has conjured up an entire community, and ineluctably immersed the reader in its dramas.' -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times A song of praise in honor of the lives it chronicles a story about people's ability to adapt and redeem themselves, to heal the wounds of isolation by moving, gropingly and imperfectly, toward community.' -Richard Tillinghast, The Washington Post Book World it has the power to exalt the reader.' - The New York Times Book Review 'A novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely. 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. 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.

And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. 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. 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 heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.

Plain song novel