Eight-year-old Alice has arrived next door, at her grandmother's, her father long gone and her mother recently deceased. This being a Kent Haruf novel, it takes a village to tell a tale. We visit with him as he tries to come to terms with his life, recalling how he came to be on his own as a teen, how he met the love of his life, how he treated those around him, his son, daughter, employees, neighbors. Over the remaining few months of his life Dad (we never learn his proper first name) does just that. Kent Haruf - Illustration by Jason Seller - image from the magazine 5280ĭad Lewis gets the bad news straight away, cancer, terminal. All Haruf's novels are top-notch, written at a very high plane of craft, observation and insight, and Benediction fits in very nicely with his existing, outstanding body of work. Benediction is not a sequel, but a stand-alone, although there are a few nods to characters from prior tales.
All his novels are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, (a stand-in for Yuma where Haruf once lived) nearer to Kansas and Nebraska than to that suspect center of the scary urban, Denver.
Nine years later we have Haruf's fifth novel, Benediction. It's sequel, Eventide, was published in 2004. Plainsong, which became a best-seller and was a National Book Award finalist, was published in 1999. His second novel, Where You Once Belonged was published in 1990. His first novel, The Ties That Bind, was published in 1984, winning a Whiting Foundation Award and a Hemingway Foundation/PEN citation. Haruf lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado, with their three daughters. Holt is loosely based on Yuma, Colorado, an early residence of Haruf in the 1980s. In 2006, Haruf was awarded the Dos Passos Prize for Literature.Īll of his novels are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado. His novel, The Tie That Binds, received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the Pen/Hemingway Foundation. Plainsong was also a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award.
Haruf is the author of Plainsong, which received the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction, and The New Yorker Book Award. For two years, he taught English in Turkey with the Peace Corps and his other jobs have included a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Colorado, a hospital in Arizona, a library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, and universities in Nebraska and Illinois. He received his Bachelors of Arts in literature from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.
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