{"product_id":"eventide-isbn-9780375725760","title":"Eventide","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER • The award-winning, bestselling author of\u003ci\u003e Plainsong \u003c\/i\u003ereturns 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. \u003cb\u003e• \u003c\/b\u003e\"Storytelling at its best.” —\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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, \u003ci\u003eEventide \u003c\/i\u003ereveals Kent Haruf as a novelist of masterful authority. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.” —\u003ci\u003eO, The Oprah Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne of the Best Books of the Year: \u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Plain Dealer\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eRocky Mountain News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Possesses the haunting appeal of music, the folksy rhythms of an American ballad  and the lovely, measured grace of an old hymn.” —Michiko Kakutani, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A kind book in a cruel world. . . [with] honest impulses, real people and the  occasional workings of grace.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An extraordinary  vision. . . . Who in America can still write like this? Who else has such confidence  and such humility?\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Haruf’s storytelling  at its best.” —\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.” —Mark Doty, \u003ci\u003eO, The Oprah Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Writing in a  style reminiscent of Hemingway, Haruf has a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue. . . .  \u003ci\u003eEventide\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eis a spare, delicate and beautiful book. Haruf has created another poignant  meditation on the true meaning of family.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Oregonian\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A clear distillation  of the writer's craft, [\u003ci\u003eEventide \u003c\/i\u003eis] a book that grabs you by the heart on the first  page, refusing to release its grasp until the last.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Denver Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Highly charged  and compassionate. . . . Every action in Holt casts a long shadow, and the gist of  Haruf's story is what happens when those shadows touch.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Haruf's  storytelling at its best.\" —\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Masterful. . . . A full and satisfying  novel . . . [that] might be even more emotionally powerful than its predecessor.  . . . [Haruf] rewards the reader's willingness to explore quotidian life with the  occasional burst of heart-pounding drama, [and] one scene of romantic discovery,  understated and painterly, is enough to weaken the knees of any cynic.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Plain  Dealer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Haruf's laconic style-- with nouns as strong and upright as fenceposts,  the verbs as clean and sharp as razor wire-- [creates] a richly symphonic effect.  . . . In creating a place whose people are tethered to each other by history and  emotion as much as place, Haruf's work is now competing with Faulkner's Mississippi,  Sherwood Anderson's Midwest, and Wallace Stegner's northern California.\" —\u003ci\u003eChicago  Sun-Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Like the lives he chronicles, Haruf's prose moves relentlessly forward,  catching in his images the fierceness and sweetness of experience.\" —\u003ci\u003eMinneapolis  Star Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"There's a decency that shines in the very accuracy with which [Haruf]  describes the ordinary--the ordinary for Holt, that is, though it has become exotic  to the rest of us. Scene after scene . . . flows by us as clear as spring water,  proof that truth, like virtue, is its own reward.\" —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eEventide \u003c\/i\u003eis a brave and admirable book. . . . Once more, [Haruf] leaves us waiting  for what he will do next, waiting for what will come.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Kansas City Star\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Haruf  is a master of evocative description, [and his] lyrical style, which has been compared  to that of Hemingway and Chekhov . . . quickly infects the reader with its own peculiar  rhythms. . . . Most important, there is Haruf's spirit, which suggests that people  unrelated by blood can and must form families, that a simple act of goodwill can  occur even when it seems impossible.\" —\u003ci\u003eSt. Louis Post-Dispatch\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Hoyt is a villain  of Dickensian proportion, and the novel lights up with smart-alecky viciousness every  time he steps onto the page.\" —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eEventide\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eis a lovely novel,  all the more for its uncompromising realism, its eschewing of the magical palliative  of happy endings, its recognition that decency carries its own unique rewards.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe  Baltimore Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The writer's heartfelt attention to his characters' wants and needs,  especially their troubled inner lives, merits a close look from anyone who reads  books to gain insight into that incalculable blend of tragedy and grace that inevitably  marks every human life.\" —\u003ci\u003eOrlando Sentinel\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Kent Haruf returns to small-town Colorado  with another pitch-perfect novel. . . . Haruf has once again demonstrated that he  can push a tale featuring our Western landscape beyond romanticized cowboy myth into  distilled reality.\" —\u003ci\u003eRocky Mountain News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Haruf's characters and his town loom as  large as any in contemporary American fiction. I hope Haruf returns to Holt for at  least one more book.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Bloomsbury Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A permanent addition  to the literary map of this country.\"\u003ci\u003e —Milwaukee Journal-Star\u003c\/i\u003eKENT HARUF is the author of five previous novels (and, with the photographer Peter Brown, \u003ci\u003eWest of Last Chance\u003c\/i\u003e). His honors include a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award, the Mountains \u0026amp; Plains Booksellers Award, the Wallace Stegner Award, and a special citation from the PEN\/Hemingway Foundation; he was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New Yorker Book Award. He died in November 2014, at the age of seventy-one.They came up from the horse barn in the slanted light of early  morning. The McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond. Old men  approaching an old house at the end of summer. They came on across  the gravel drive past the pickup and the car parked at the hogwire  fencing and came one after the other through the wire gate. At the  porch they scraped their boots on the saw blade sunken in the dirt,  the ground packed and shiny around it from long use and mixed with  barnlot manure, and walked up the plank steps onto the screened porch  and entered the kitchen where the nineteen-year-old girl Victoria  Roubideaux sat at the pinewood table feeding oatmeal to her little  daughter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the kitchen they removed their hats and hung them on pegs set into  a board next to the door and began at once to wash up at the sink.  Their faces were red and weather-blasted below their white foreheads,  the coarse hair on their round heads grown iron-gray and as stiff as  the roached mane of a horse. When they finished at the sink they each  in turn used the kitchen towel to dry off, but when they began to  dish up their plates at the stove the girl made them sit down.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere's no use in you waiting on us, Raymond said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI want to, she said. I'll be gone tomorrow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe rose with the child on her hip and brought two coffee cups and  two bowls of oatmeal and a plate of buttered toast to the table and  then sat down again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHarold sat eyeing the oatmeal. You think she might of at least give  us steak and eggs this once, he said. On account of the occasion. But  no sir, it's still only warm mush. Which tastes about like the back  page of a wet newspaper. Delivered yesterday.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou can eat what you want after I'm gone. I know you will anyway.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYes ma'am, probably so. Then he looked at her. But I'm not in any  rush for you to leave here. I'm just trying to joke you a little.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI know you are. She smiled at him. Her teeth were very white in her  brown face, and her black hair was thick and shiny and cut off neat  below her shoulders. I'm almost ready, she said. First I want to feed  Katie and get her dressed, then we can start.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet me have her, Raymond said. Is she done eating?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo, she isn't, the girl said. She might eat something for you though.  She just turns her head away for me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRaymond stood and walked around the table and took up the little girl  and returned to his seat and sat her on his lap and sprinkled sugar  on the oatmeal in his bowl and poured out milk from the jar on the  table and began to eat, the black-haired round-cheeked girl watching  him as if she were fascinated by what he was doing. He held her  easily, comfortably, his arm about her, and spooned up a small  portion and blew over it and offered it to her. She took it. He ate  more himself. Then he blew over another spoonful and gave that to  her. Harold poured milk into a glass and she leaned forward over the  table and drank a long time, using both hands, until she had to stop  for breath.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat am I going to do in Fort Collins when she won't eat? Victoria said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou can call on us, Harold said. We'll come see about this little  girl in about two minutes. Won't we, Katie.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe child looked across the table at him, unblinking. Her eyes were  as black as her mother's, like buttons or currants. She said nothing  but took up Raymond's calloused hand and moved it toward the cereal  bowl. When he held out the spoon she pushed his hand toward his  mouth. Oh, he said. All right. He blew over it elaborately, puffing  his cheeks, moving his red face back and forth, and now she would eat  again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen they were finished Victoria carried her daughter into the  bathroom off the dining room to wash her face and then took her back  to their bedroom and changed her clothes. The McPheron brothers went  upstairs to their rooms and got into town clothes, dark trousers and  pale shirts with pearl snaps and their good white hand-shaped Bailey  hats. Back downstairs they carried Victoria's suitcases out to the  car and set them in the trunk. The backseat was already loaded with  boxes of the little girl's clothes and blankets and bedsheets and  toys, and a child's padded car seat. Behind the car was the pickup  and in its bed, together with the spare tire and the jack and a half  dozen empty oil cans and dry wisps of brome hay and a piece of rusted  barbed wire, were the little girl's high chair and her daybed, its  mattress wrapped in a new tarp, all of it lashed down with orange  binder twine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey returned to the house and came out with Victoria and the little  girl. On the porch Victoria paused for a moment, her dark eyes  welling with sudden tears.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat's the matter here? Harold said. Is something wrong?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe shook her head.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou know you can always come back. We're expecting you to. We're  counting on it. Maybe it'll help to keep that in mind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt isn't that, she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIs it because you're kind of scared? Raymond said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt's just that I'm going to miss you, she said. I haven't been gone  before, not like this. That other time with Dwayne I can't even  remember and I don't want to. She shifted the little girl from one  arm to the other and wiped at her eyes. I'm just going to miss you,  that's all it is.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou can call if you need something, Harold said. We'll still be here  at the other end.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut I'm still going to miss you.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYes, Raymond said. He looked out from the porch toward the barnlot  and the brown pastures beyond. The blue sandhills in the far distance  low on the low horizon, the sky so clear and empty, the air so dry.  We're going to miss you too, he said. We'll be about like old  played-out workhorses once you're gone. Standing around lonesome,  always looking over the fence. He turned to study her face. A face  familiar and dear to him now, the three of them and the baby living  in the same open country, in the same old weathered house. But you  think you can come on? he said. We probably ought to get this thing  started if we're going to.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRaymond drove her car with Victoria sitting beside him so she could  reach into the back and tend to Katie in her padded chair. Harold  followed them in the pickup, out the lane onto the gravel county  road, headed west to the two-lane blacktop, then north toward Holt.  The country both sides of the highway was flat and treeless, the  ground sandy, the wheat stubble in the flat fields still bright and  shiny since its cutting in July. Beyond the barrow ditches the  irrigated corn stood up eight feet tall, darkly green and heavy. The  grain elevators in the distance showed tall and white in town beside  the railroad tracks. It was a bright warm day with the wind coming  hot out of the south.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Holt they turned onto US 34 and stopped at the Gas and Go where  Main Street intersected the highway. The McPherons got out and stood  at the pumps, gassing up both vehicles as Victoria went in to buy  them cups of coffee and a Coke for herself and a bottle of juice for  the little girl. Ahead of her in line at the cash register a heavy  black-haired man and his wife were standing with a young girl and a  small boy. She had seen them walking at all hours along the streets  of Holt and she had heard the stories. She thought that if it weren't  for the McPheron brothers she might be like them herself. She watched  as the girl moved to the front of the store and took a magazine from  the rack at the plateglass windows and flipped through it with her  back turned away as if she were not related in any manner to the  people at the counter. But after the man had paid for a box of cheese  crackers and four cans of pop with food stamps, she put the magazine  back and followed the rest of her family out the door.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Victoria came out, the man and the woman were standing in the  tarred parking lot deciding something between themselves. She  couldn't see the girl or her brother, then turned and saw they were  standing together at the corner under the traffic light, looking up  Main Street toward the middle of town, and she went on to where  Raymond and Harold were waiting for her at the car.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was shortly after noon when they drove down the ramp off the  interstate and into the outskirts of Fort Collins. To the west, the  foothills rose up in a ragged blue line obscured by yellow smog blown  up from the south, blown up from Denver. On one of the hills a white  A was formed of whitewashed rocks, a carryover from when the  university's teams were called the Aggies. They drove up Prospect  Road and turned onto College Avenue, the campus was all on the left  side with its brick buildings, the old gymnasium, the smooth greens  lawns, and passed along the street under the cottonwoods and tall  blue spruce until they turned onto Mulberry and then turned again and  then located the apartment building set back from the street where  the girl and her daughter would now live.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey parked the car and the pickup in the lot behind the building,  and Victoria went in with the little girl to find the apartment  manager. The manager turned out to be a college girl not unlike  herself, only older, a senior in sweatshirt and jeans with her blonde  hair sprayed up terrifically on her head. She came out into the  hallway to introduce herself and began at once to explain that she  was majoring in elementary education and working as a student teacher  this semester in a little town east of Fort Collins, talking without  pause while she led Victoria to the second-floor apartment. She  unlocked the door and handed over the key and another one for the  outside door, then stopped abruptly and looked at Katie. Can I hold  her?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI don't think so, Victoria said. She won't go to everybody.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe McPherons brought up the suitcases and the boxes from the car and  set them in the small bedroom. They looked around and went back for  the daybed and high chair.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStanding in the door, the manager looked over at Victoria. Are they  your grandfathers or something?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho are they? Your uncles?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat about her daddy then? Is he coming too?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVictoria looked at her. Do you always ask so many questions?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI'm just trying to make friends. I wouldn't pry or be rude.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe're not related that way, Victoria said. They saved me two years  ago when I needed help so badly. That's why they're here.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey're preachers, you mean.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo. They're not preachers. But they did save me. I don't know what I  would've done without them. And nobody better say a word against them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI've been saved too, the girl said. I praise Jesus every day of my life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat's not what I meant, Victoria said. I wasn't talking about that at all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe McPheron brothers stayed with Victoria Roubideaux and the little  girl throughout the afternoon and helped arrange their belongings in  the rooms, then in the evening took them out to supper. Afterward  they came back to the rented apartment. When they were parked in the  lot behind the building they stood out on the pavement in the cool  night air to say good-bye. The girl was crying a little again now.  She stood up on her toes and kissed each of the old men on his  weathered cheek and hugged them and thanked them for all they had  done for her and her daughter, and they each in turn put their arms  around her and patted her awkwardly on the back. They kissed the  little girl. Then they stood back uncomfortably and could not think  how to look at her or the child any longer, nor how to do much else  except leave.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou make sure to call us, Raymond said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI'll call every week.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat'll be good, Harold said. We'll want to hear your news.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen they drove home in the pickup. Heading east away from the  mountains and the city, out onto the silent high plains spread out  flat and dark under the bright myriad indifferent stars. It was late  when they pulled into the drive and stopped in front of the house.  They had scarcely spoken in two hours. The yardlight on the pole  beside the garage had come on in their absence, casting dark purple  shadows past the garage and the outbuildings and past the three  stunted elm trees standing inside the hogfencing that surrounded the  gray clapboard house.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the kitchen Raymond poured milk into a pan on the stove and heated  it and got down a box of crackers from the cupboard. They sat at the  table under the overhead light and drank down the warm milk without a  word. It was silent in the house. There was not even the sound of  wind outside for them to hear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI guess I might just as well go up to bed, Harold said. I'm not doing  any good down here. He walked out of the kitchen and entered the  bathroom and then came back. I guess you've decided to sit out here  all night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI'll be up after a while, Raymond said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWell, Harold said. All right then. He looked around. At the kitchen  walls and the old enameled stove and through the door into the dining  room where the yardlight fell in through the curtainless windows onto  the walnut table. It feels empty already, don't it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEmpty as hell, Raymond said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI wonder what she's doing now. I wonder if she's all right.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI hope she's sleeping. I hope her and that little girl are both  sleeping. That'd be the best thing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYes, it would. Harold bent and peered out the kitchen window into the  darkness north of the house, then stood erect. Well, I'm going up, he  said. I can't think what else I'm suppose to do.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI'll be up shortly. I want to sit here a while.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDon't fall asleep down here. You'll be sorry for it tomorrow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI know. I won't. Go ahead on. I won't be long.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHarold started out of the room but stopped at the door and turned  back once more. You reckon it's warm enough in that apartment of  hers? I been trying to think. I can't recollect a thing about the  temperature in them rooms she rented.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt seemed like it was warm enough to me. When we was in there it did.  If it wasn't I guess we'd of noticed it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou think it was too warm?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI don't guess so. I reckon we'd of noticed that too. If it was.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI'm going to bed. It's just goddamn quiet around here is all I got to say.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI'll be up after a bit, Raymond said.A Novel","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300140470501,"sku":"NP9780375725760","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375725760.jpg?v=1767726420","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/eventide-isbn-9780375725760","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}