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by Bruce Holbert
After losing both his twin and his father in a brutal, unexpected snowstorm, Matt Lawson must take over the family ranch. As his mother disappears into grief, Matt learns the hardest lesson the west has to teach: he is on his own. The necessity of work stabilizes young Matt against the pitfalls of first love with Wendy, the daughter of a local grocer, and their ragged end will sent Matt on a journey across the county, leaving Wendy to tend the ranch with local schoolteacher Linda Jefferson and her unwieldy son Lucky. It will take decades for Matt to learn his way back home, and that long journey will have great impact on all of those around him.
Invoking the same beautiful landscape and language of his critically-acclaimed debut, The Hour of Lead is a wider, more expansive novel, less violent but just as affecting, another important contribution to the literature of the west.
"Starred Review. Holbert's second novel is a tale of the American West as faithful to the legends as McCarthy's Border Trilogy… Holbert's powerful work echoes the romance of America's Western experience. A masterpiece." - Kirkus
"Holbert's clever conclusion offers several surprising twists and some satisfaction, in this bleak story about people whose desperate pursuit of happiness is just a cruel illusion." - Publishers Weekly
"Bruce Holbert is a lyrical, soulful chronicler of our ever-changing West." - Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
"The characters in Bruce Holbert's beautifully imagined novel endure extraordinary pain as they negotiate the complicated landscape of rural Washington state; with each breathtaking sentence, Holbert brings us into their lives, sorrows, and longings with a fierce, compassionate vision that does not let the reader go." - Karen E. Bender
This information about The Hour of Lead was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Other Voices, The Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, West Wind Review, Cairn and The New York Times. Bruce Holbert grew up on the Columbia River in the shadow of the Grand Coulee and a stone's throw from the Okanogan Mountains. His great-grandfather was an Indian scout and among the first settlers of the Grand Coulee.
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