Tom Connor's Gift - Softcover

Cates, David Allan

4.39

31 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 096237895X ISBN 13: 9780962378959

Publisher: Bangtail Press, 2014

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A recently-widowed doctor, stunned by grief, retreats to a cabin on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front. Inside she has a puppy and a stack of letters from an old lover. Outside, there's a bear. As she revisits the letters from Tom Connor, we come to see, through his eyes, the dusty, broken alleys of Central America during the war years. The two narratives taken together explore themes of life-long love, about what we can see only when we are ready to see, and how hope can grow in the darkest of places. The third in what the author sees as his "homecoming trilogy" (after "Hunger in American" and "Ben Armstrong's Strange Trip Home"), "Tom Connor's Gift" shines a light on the transformative act of storytelling itself, and is destined to be received as one of the most important novels of the year. David Allan Cates's "Tom Connor's Gift" is extraordinary. The prose is ravishing, the characters are surprising and irresistible, and many of its scenes are so intensely moving that they bring tears of gratitude and pleasure. The book praises long marriage and long friendship, but what I especially appreciate about its vision is how sexually liberating it is for both men and women. Cates is a fierce and fearless writer! One finishes this novel feeling wiser, more alive, and spiritually refreshed. David Huddle Sadness and madness, grief and delirium. "Tom Connor's Gift" delivers us precious monsters: our first true love and our true lasting love. Coursing between anecdote and musing, this is a novel only grownups can understand. It is smart and ecstatic and will break your goddamn heart. Bryan Di Salvatore David Allan Cates evokes the human heart out of the landscape, blending the two with so much subtlety and skill that the very world in this novel shimmers with yearning. Tom Connor is as complex and fascinating a character as I have read in contemporary fiction, and Cates has an uncanny ability to evoke the beautiful and terrifying, the feverish and gritty Central American world

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