#Our souls at night book buy how to
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One day, Addie approaches Louis and asks if he would consider coming to her house occasionally, to share her bed. In their 70s, they are both widowed and living alone with their fractured pasts. An American voice like no other.'Īnd to this, I add the perfection of Our Souls at Night.Īddie Moore and Louis Waters are neighbors, familiar but not friends, in Haruf's conjured Holt, CO. Kent Haruf is the author I take to other countries, pressing his name into the ears of readers not familiar with his work.

#Our souls at night book buy full

And I come full circle, to mourn a cherished voice silenced by disease and death. I weep for all the stories we will never witness. I weep for aging bodies, for small, mean minds that do such damage, for the elderly, forgotten and alone. Even now, thinking of endings, of the ending of this book, the ending of an author I adore, I weep. I read Our Souls at Night in one sitting and wept in the final pages. Our Souls at Night is simply, profoundly, an exquisite homage to love. Despite knowing his life was coming to a sooner end than it should, or perhaps because of this, he created a story about finding love in the final chapter. Kent Haruf wrote Our Souls at Night under a death sentence. 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.

And the subtle denouement then sweeps both of these amazing people forward-heartbreakingly, hearteningly into the unknown. As are the things that jeopardize them, from the death of a mutual friend to family tensions that suddenly test Addie and Louis's ability to withstand them. A camping trip in the mountains, a trip to the county fair, simple pleasures that are a hallmark of Haruf's fiction.

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Jamie is confused and hurt, of course, but gradually finds comfort in the company of his grandmother and her friend Louis, neither of whom has spent much time with kids in years but in turn learn how to all over again. This unusual arrangement, as Addie predicted, provokes local comment, and then the disapproval of their children, and their nightly pattern is further disrupted when her son, whose wife has departed for California, asks Addie to take in his six-year-old son, Jamie, for the summer while he tries to solve his various troubles. And so their lives now find a new rhythm and their conversations range freely, if sometimes haltingly, through their personal histories: his work as a high school English teacher the loss of her teenage daughter, and the harm this did to her marriage as well as their son his brief affair, as a young husband and father, which Addie had heard about their youthful aspirations and middle-age disappointments and compromises the joy both feel in at last being able to express the woof and weave of their experiences. Louis is surprised, even shocked, that she would've thought of him, though he soon is brave enough to try, impressed by the courage of her proposal. What Addie has come to ask-since she and Louis have been living alone for so long in houses now empty of family, and the nights are so terribly lonely-is whether he might be willing to spend them with her, in her bed, so they can have someone to talk with. His daughter, Holly, lives hours away in Colorado Springs her son, Gene, even farther away in Grand Junction. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have long been aware of each other, if not exactly friends in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis's wife. In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf's fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future.