Plainsong


Book Description

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.




Eventide


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The award-winning, bestselling author of Plainsong returns to the high-plains town of Holt, Colorado, with a novel that unveils the immemorial truths about human beings: their fragility and resilience, their selfishness and goodness, and their ability to find family in one another. • "Storytelling at its best.” —Entertainment Weekly The aging McPheron brothers are learning to live without Victoria Roubideaux, the single mother they took in and who has now left their ranch to start college. A lonely young boy stoically cares for his grandfather while a disabled couple tries to protect their a violent relative. As these lives unfold and intersect, Eventide reveals Kent Haruf as a novelist of masterful authority. “Stunning.... The dry, cold air of Colorado's high plains seems to intensify the light Kent Haruf shines on every character in his masterful novel.... A book of hope, hope as plain and hard-won as Haruf's keenly styled prose.” —O, The Oprah Magazine




Plainsong for Caitlin


Book Description

Caitlin and Rebecca's world crumbles when they hear of the disaster at sea in which thier father is killed. With meager funds, the sisters leave New Bedford to begin a new life on the western frontier.




A Manual of Plain Song


Book Description




The River, the Plain, and the State


Book Description

This book explores the human-engineered flooding of China's Yellow River, and how it affected the state, environment, and inhabitants of the region.




Plainsong Accompaniment


Book Description




Plain Kate


Book Description

A debut novel that's as sharp as a knife's point. Plain Kate lives in a world of superstitions and curses, where a song can heal a wound and a shadow can work deep magic. As the wood-carver's daughter, Kate held a carving knife before a spoon, and her wooden charms are so fine that some even call her "witch-blade" -- a dangerous nickname in a town where witches are hunted and burned in the square.




Plains Song for Female Voices


Book Description

"This narrative, which on its surface is an account of three generations of women (and a few of their men) living on the plains of Nebraska ... only gets more strange and beautiful the more you look at it, like a photograph that slowly reveals its truth under very close inspection."--Introduction, p. [v].




Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain


Book Description

A cumulative rhyme relating how Ki-pat brought rain to the drought-stricken Kapiti Plain. Verna Aardema has brought the original story closer to the English nursery rhyme by putting in a cumulative refrain and giving the tale the rhythm of “The House That Jack Built.”




Plainsong


Book Description

A nameless, ambitionless office worker finds his small apartment gradually invaded by three other people: all younger than himself, but seemingly no less adrift. The year is 1986, and the strange communal life of this foursome, extending over half a year, from the end of winter to midsummer, makes up the plot, such as it is, of Plainsong, as this ersatz family finds itself growing closer, and life continues quietly around them. Part of the generation that grew to prominence following the success of baby boomers like Haruki Murakami, Kazushi Hosaka s work chronicles the small moments, the moments without conflict, that most novels work to elide. His characters talk, work, exist; their story is one where the tiniest occurrence takes on the proportions of a grand drama.