Some Jeffrey Lent Stuff

I've got two Jeffrey Lent related pieces of information. First is a very early, very positive STARRED review from Publishers Weekly for his forthcoming novel, A Peculiar Grace. It doesn't come out until late July, but they obviously wanted to go on record first. Here's what they said...

Family-fracturing secrets are at the heart of Lent's luminous third novel, a transcendent story about the healing power of love and art. Two decades after an intense romance curdled, hermetic Hewitt Pearce is living in his familys rural Vermont home, firing up his tractor for the occasional two-mile trip to the village, sometimes hiding in his hay barn, and producing prized custom ironwork when the spirit moves him. Upheaval arrives in the form of Jessica, a psychologically troubled waif with mysterious connections to Hewitt's late artist father. Then Hewitt learns that Emily, the girl he loved years earlier and whose life he has tracked from afar, is now a widow. Evocative flashbacks reveal his family's turbulent history, including Hewitt's days of sex, drugs, and rock and roll on a commune and his dark period of "death-by-whisky drinking" after breaking up with Emily. This sympathetic depiction of a decent man wrestling with his demons while deciding whether to revive an old love or open himself to a new lover is less visceral than Lent's astonishing debut, In the Fall, and less gritty than his second novel, Lost Nation, but it's no less magisterial and every bit as beautifully written.

Not bad. Okay, the other thing is that Jeffrey offered a blurb for Acacia. I'm thrilled about this. Jeffrey has blurbed my books before, so that part of it isn't new. But I wasn't sure at all what he'd think of Acacia: The War with the Mein. He's a highly literary writer, and his reading tastes are mostly in that area. But he read the novel with an open mind and liked it enough that he didn't mind saying so publicly. Here's what he said...

It's the rare novel indeed that overwhelms and absorbs us to the point that we live fully within it. I read Acacia in four long wondrous days, unable to leave the book. Durham has created a world so familiar and distant at once that the reader is transported and transfixed- the braiding together of this world through numerable plotlines is effortlessly accomplished and compelling with magnificent prose that illuminates crisply and cinematically. Acacia is full of wonders, brought to us by a masterful writer, a wizard of mind and place.

Cool.