Plainsong -- Kent Haruf, Paperback

National Book Award Finalist

A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl--her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house--is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together--their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.

Author: Kent Haruf
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 08/22/2000
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.54lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.38w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780375705854

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 4.6
Point Value: 13
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 44559 / Plainsong

Award: L.A. Times Book Prize - Nominee

Review Citation(s):
Entertainment Weekly 09/29/2000 pg. 124
New York Times 10/01/2000 pg. 28
New York Times 12/03/2000 pg. 109
ALA Best Books Young Adults 01/01/2001 pg. 1366
Newsweek 10/12/2009 pg. 54
Entertainment Weekly 09/04/2015 pg. 44

About the Author
KENT HARUF is the author of five previous novels (and, with the photographer Peter Brown, West of Last Chance). His honors include a Whiting Foundation Writers' Award, the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, the Wallace Stegner Award, and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation; he was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New Yorker Book Award. He died in November 2014, at the age of seventy-one.