New Novel by Kent Haruf (Turkey 1965-67)

Benediction, a new new novel by Kent Haruf, was published in March and I missed the pub date. Here is some information on the book.

Benediction
By Kent Haruf (Turkey 1965–67)
Knopf
$25.95 (hardcover), $15.00 (paperback), $12.99 (Kindle)
272 pages
2013

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2013: Kent Haruf writes about small towns and regular people, but don’t underestimate his ambition. He is writing about life, and to do that he has returned again and again–first with Plainsong, later with Eventide–to the small town of Holt, located on the eastern plains of Colorado. In Benediction, Haruf introduces us to Dad Lewis, a 77-year-old hardware store owner who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The experience of reading Haruf is a slow burn, but as we meet the people who gather around Dad Lewis in his final days we begin to see that this is a book about community, about the things that bind us, as well as the secrets we keep to ourselves. Haruf writes with a tense, quiet realism that elevates life and death, granting both a dignity that touches on poetry. — Chris Schluep

From Booklist

*Starred Review* From the territory and populace of his native American West, the author of Plainsong (1999) and Eventide (2004) again draws a story elegant in its simple telling and remarkable in its authentic capture of universal human emotions. The last, dying days of old Dad Lewis supply the framework for this sober yet reverberant novel. Dad owns a store in a small Colorado town, and his terminal illness draws out the compassion of his adult daughter, whom Dad wants to take over his business upon his imminent passing, and sparks an arousal in his long-devoted wife to seek some degree of resolution to an unhealed family wound. Dad’s closing days also stir emotions in other town residents who are in Dad’s realm of acquaintances, including the girl who moved in next door to stay with her grandmother and whose memories of her deceased mother remain raw; the new minister in town who suddenly rebels against the reluctance of his congregation to think about new ideas; and a mother and daughter, the former advanced in years and the latter now in middle age, who still confront traits in each other that they would just as soon not see. — Brad Hooper