Neverhome
Laird Hunt, 2014
Little, Brown and Co.
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316370134
Summary
She calls herself Ash, but that's not her real name. She is a farmer's faithful wife, but she has left her husband to don the uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War.
Neverhome tells the harrowing story of Ash Thompson during the battle for the South. Through bloodshed and hysteria and heartbreak, she becomes a hero, a folk legend, a madwoman and a traitor to the American cause.
Laird Hunt's dazzling new novel throws a light on the adventurous women who chose to fight instead of stay behind. It is also a mystery story: why did Ash leave and her husband stay? Why can she not return? What will she have to go through to make it back home?
In gorgeous prose, Hunt's rebellious young heroine fights her way through history, and back home to her husband, and finally into our hearts. (From the publisher.)
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Author Bio
• Birth—April 3, 1968
• Raised—Singapore, San Francisco, The Hague, London, and Indiania, USA
• Education—B.A., Indiana University; M.F.A., Naropa University
• Awards—Anisfield-Wolf Award
• Currently—lives in Boulder, Colorado
Laird Hunt is an American writer, translator and academic. He grew up in Singapore, San Francisco, The Hague, and London before moving to his grandmother's farm in rural Indiana, where he attended Clinton Central High School. He earned a B.A. from Indiana University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He also studied French literature at the Sorbonne.
Hunt worked in the press office at the United Nations while writing his first novel. He is currently a professor in the Creative Writing program at Denver University. Hunt lives with his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, in Boulder, Colorado.
Hunt is the author of several novels and a collection of short work. His works intersect several genres, including experimental literature, exploratory fiction, literary noir, speculative fiction and difficult fiction. They include elements ranging from the bizarre, the tragic, and the comic. His influences include Georges Perec, W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and the French Modernists.
He has also translated several novels from French, including Oliver Rohe's Vacant Lot (2010) and Stuart Merrill's Paul Verlaine (2010). He has contributed to many literary publications, including McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Bomb, Bookforum, The Believer, Fence, and Conjunctions and is currently editor of the Denver Quarterly.
Laird is a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, a two-time finalist for the PEN Center USA Award in Fiction, and the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/20/2014.)
Book Reviews
[E]nthralling.... Rarely, a voice so compels it’s as if we’re furtively eavesdropping on a whispered confession, which is how I felt reading Neverhome: I was marching alongside Ash, eager for more of her well-guarded secrets.... [Hunt's} ability to evoke her demeanor and circumstances in a gorgeously written sentence or two is one of the book’s many pleasures.
Karen Abbott - New York Times Book Review
A masterful job of story-telling...many beautifully written passages....For all its blood and wandering, The Odyssey is a tale of triumph. Neverhome, as befits the modern age, is more ambiguous.
Patrick Reardon - Chicago Tribune
Hunt effortlessly renders the cadences of the region and the times.
Gina Webb - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Even with a wide range of subjects, his writing plumbs the depths of the internal struggles we all face and the external circumstances that shape how we respond....Hunt's writing is straightforward, unadorned in its complete portrait. At no point does the story feel like one told by a man in the 21st century; it is all of a piece with the temperament and thoughts of a woman taking up arms for her country.
Matthew Tiffany - Kansas City Star
The wiry, androgynous and mysterious Hoosier of Hunt's haunting novel Neverhome pushes through its pages like a spring crocus shoot....This is mystical, transcendent storytelling full of sun and shadows, memories and dreams, in a language and syntax from another time and place. Hunt...is an extraordinary, original writer.
Jane Sumner - Dallas Morning News
Inspired by true stories of women who fought, this plainspoken story packs firepower.
Kim Hubbard - People
The novel's cadence is deceptively low-key-it lulls, then startles with its power-much like the miraculous Ash.
Oprah Magazine
[A] haunting meditation on the complexity of human character, the power of secrets, and the contradictions of the American experience.... [Hunt] transcends simplistic distinctions between male and female, good and bad. The language...is triumphant as well: sometimes blunt, sometimes visionary, and always fascinating.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Hunt brings an especially bittersweet and lyrical tone to this forgotten part of Civil War history and gives to several hundred women who did indeed make the momentous decision to fight.... An amazing book.
Library Journal
Hunt uses Ash's powerful voice-a mixture of insight, eloquence and rural dialect-to make the brother-against-brother nightmare of the Civil War an intimate experience for the reader....Tragedy dogs the steps of a remarkable narrator whom readers will carry in their hearts long after her final battle.
Shelf Awareness
(Starred review.) A novel that takes us there and back again, "there" being the Civil War and back again, a farm in Indiana.... While comparisons to Cold Mountain are inevitable, Ash's journey has its own integrity. Hunt keeps the pace brisk and inserts some new feminist twists into the genre of the Civil War odyssey.
Kirkus Reviews
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