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  • Published: 5 February 2015
  • ISBN: 9781448191352
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Neverhome




'A beguiling and evocative story about love and loss, duty and deceit... Neverhome took me on a journey so thoroughly engrossed that there were times the pages seemed to turn themselves.' KEVIN POWERS, author of The Yellow Birds

I was strong and he was not so it was me went to war to defend the Republic. I stepped across the border out of Indiana into Ohio. Twenty dollars, two salt-pork sandwiches, and I took jerky, biscuits, six old apples, fresh underthings and a blanket too.

There was a conflagration to come; I wanted to lend it my spark.

Meet Gallant Ash: hero, folk legend and master of war. Ash is a leader of men and a brutal and fearless soldier. Will look you dead in the eye and kill for no reason. But Ash has a secret. Gallant Ash is a woman. This is her story.

  • Published: 5 February 2015
  • ISBN: 9781448191352
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

About the author

Laird Hunt

Laird Hunt is the author of six novels, a collection of stories and two translations. Kind One was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, and his last novel, Neverhome, won the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine and The Bridge Prize and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Étranger. He teaches in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Denver, where he edits the Denver Quarterly. He and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace.

Also by Laird Hunt

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Praise for Neverhome

A spare, beautiful novel, so deeply about America and the language of America that its sentences seem to rise up from the earth itself. Laird Hunt had me under his spell from the first word of Neverhome to the last. Magnificent

Paul Auster

The Civil War has given us so many great literary works that I couldn't have imagined a new fictional approach that was both stunningly original and yet utterly natural, even inevitable. But this is just what Laird Hunt brilliantly delivers in his new novel. The key is his central character: in her voice, her personality, her yearning, she deeply touches our shared and enduring humanity. Neverhome is masterful work by one of our finest writers

Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

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

An exquisitely wrought vision of the terrible ravages of war - on the land, on the human body, and on the mind

Booklist

With nothing but the simple language of well-worn words, Mr Hunt has conjured up a wholly original heroine with an utterly fresh voice... A book that deserves a wider readership.

The Economist

Neverhome is a wondrous feat. Few novels written in English approach its linguistic verve

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

A brilliant and breathtaking blaze of a novel

Clare Clark, Guardian

This is a slim and unshowy story of devastating power, an epic poem in its own vernacular, an upside-down Odyssey at once particular and hauntingly universal. Quietly, relentlessly, without wasting a word, it works its way under the skin and into the marrow of the bones... Hunt has coaxed a brilliant and breathtaking blaze of a novel.

Clare Clark, Guardian

Staggering... he reinvigorates the American language with a poetic urgency equal to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The story is strong, the prose superbly wrought.

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

A beguiling and evocative story about love and loss, duty and deceit... Neverhome took me on a journey so thoroughly engrossed that there were times the pages seemed to turn themselves.

Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds

Original, powerful writing

Viv Groskop, Red Online

This book casts such an intoxicating spell…that its end comes as a cold shock… This is an alluring novel with a stubbornly enduring afterlife

Big Issue

One of the strengths of this compelling novel…is its blend of realism with a powerful sense of the folklore around women who defy the expectations of the societies in which they find themselves

Erica Wagner, New Statesman

Neverhome is a memorable evocation of a life twisted out of shape by violence and cruelty

Sunday Times

The ending is in equal parts surprising and satisfying… I was left wanting more from this entrancing novel. Ash is a thoroughly compelling narrator and Neverhome a dark gem of a book

Frank Brinkley, Literary Review

It’s a fascinating slant on history. I am looking forward to reading Neverhome again at a more leisurely pace to savour the language and larger-than-life characters

Margaret Cain, Nudge

[Neverhome] is a remarkable achievement. You awake from it as you would from a nightmare — sadder, wiser — knowing that war makes a nest inside you; fear unpicks the soul. And if you return from it intact, you bring it with you

Alexander Gilmour, Financial Times

Gritty, lyrical and compelling

Neville Hawcock, Financial Times

Hunt’s ability to render real events in a fictional form…shouldn’t be underestimated. He pitches his story perfectly, making Constance/Gallant Ash a rounded and psychologically convincing character. His depictions of battle scenes and a landscape ripped apart by war are also striking and authentic.

Lesley Mcdowell, Independent