David James Duncan is a father, a renowned fly fisher, an activist, and the author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K, the story collection River Teeth, and the nonfiction collections My Story as Told by Water-a National Book Award finalist-and God Laughs & Plays. His work has won three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, a Lannan Fellowship, the Western States Book Award, a National Book Award nomination, inclusion in Best American Essays, Best American Sports Writing, Best American Catholic Writing, five volumes of Best American Spiritual Writing, an honorary doctorate from University of Portland, the American Library Association's 2003 Award for the Preservation of Intellectual Freedom (with co-author Wendell Berry), and other honors. David lives with his family in Montana.
"Sun House quickly envelopes readers in language that offers up new
ways of thinking. There's an honorable gentleness in the characters
that engenders a longing to understand our fellow humans...The
novel creates an immersive experience with its thin, Bible-like
pages and various font treatments that indicate journal entries and
dream sequences, different tones of voice, and winding narration,
which makes reading feel akin to following a snaking river."--Anna
Paige, MONTANA FREE PRESS
"[Sun House] is what might colloquially be called a yarn. Like the
best-told folk tales in every culture, the story is an adventure, a
comedy and what could be called a teaching moment. Indeed, a moment
we can all learn from."--Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch
"Reading [Sun House] is to fall in love with its myriad characters
as they move through their own versions of walking a spiritual
path. It's a rare novel that can hold up under the sheer weight of
so many fully drawn and endlessly fascinating characters. Sun House
doesn't just hold the weight, it floats and even soars with
it."--Marc Beaudin, Big Sky Journal
"[Sun House] takes as many turns as Missoula's Rattlesnake Creek,
all the while celebrating the extraordinary power of
community."--Debra Magpie Earling, The New York Times
"[Sun House is] a cosmic trip that braids together a dozen lives
that cross and gurgle like the fictional Elkmoon River."--Outside,
Best Books of Fall
"Sun House is a voluminous chronicle of a specific time in American
history . . . As is the trademark of his fiction, Duncan's
spotlight shines brightest on the in-betweens and exceptions in
religious tradition, the cracks."--Jessie van Eerden, Commonweal
Magazine
"[Sun House] feels both capacious and tightly packed, as musical
and shimmering as its title suggests. It is the product of long
workdays, seismic struggles both personal and global -- and a level
of compassion and spirituality that transcends all of it."--Maggie
Neal Doherty, Los Angeles Times
"Asian wisdom traditions and an Emersonian reverence for what can
be learned from nature have always suffused Duncan's work, but in
Sun House they are front and center on nearly every page."--John
Williams, The Washington Post
"Duncan's sprawling new novel blends frustration with the divine,
strange moments of random chance and the search for community. It's
an epic read to tackle as the summer starts to wind down."--Tobias
Carroll, Inside Hook
"The time, energy, focus, precision, invention, scholarship, fun,
joy, love, courage and compassion that went into making this novel
boggle my mind...Just contemplating its creation is something of a
spiritual journey in itself. Finding this kind of expansive
refreshment at this most narrow-minded moment in history is a
gift."--RICHARD POWERS for The Washington Post
"Set within a hauntingly beautiful landscape, Sun House presents a
rare version of the American West, one teeming with mysticism,
yearning, and compassion."--Alta
"Jim Harrison meets Robert M. Pirsig, Timothy Leary, and the Dalai
Lama in Duncan's long-awaited follow-up to The River Why (1983) and
The Brothers K (1992)...arch and bookish (Gary Snyder makes a cameo
appearance), [Sun House] will prove captivating to those who enjoy
novels of ideas--in this case, one that modernizes the Western by
injecting it with ethnic diversity and doses of philosophy (and
LSD, even)...a book by a first-rate writer and one to be
savored."--Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
"Sun House is a cathedral, a high-domed room of stories the reader
enters and never fully leaves...a profound gift to readers (like
me) who hunger for the insights of ancient texts but lack the
appetite to read them on my own."--HANK LENTFER, author of Raven's
Witness and Faith of Cranes
"There are books that make you a happy insomniac and Sun House is
absolutely one of them, like Quixote or Moby or Copperfield, the
kind when you wake at three in the morning you remember that beside
the bed is a thousand-room mansion of a novel, where every door
opens to unexpected weather and a keen sense of appetite. Here is
the best part: while these characters come in all shades of funny
and searching and rueful and indignant, they are all right there
and as wide awake as you are. A new big book from David James
Duncan? This is a lucky time to be a reader."--LEIF ENGER, author
of Peace Like a River
"One of the greatest imaginative achievements I've encountered in a
lifetime of reading--brimming with invention, mirth, and wisdom. It
transports us into a world more radiant and vivid than this one, or
rather one just as radiant and vivid, if only we attended to it
with the heightened awareness it urges us to cultivate."--WILLIAM
DEBUYS, author of The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an
Age of Loss
"Reading Sun House is like watching dawn in the high country. A
clear, eastern light gains strength as the story unfolds, revealing
a landscape as vast and gorgeous as any mountain range at daybreak.
On this bright stage, David James Duncan's unlikely,
perfectly-wrought, beloved characters perform a miracle: From
ragged strands of tragedy and epiphany, they weave the fabric of a
more openhearted world."--BRYCE ANDREWS, author of Holding Fire: A
Reckoning with the American West
"Like all truly extraordinary novels, the luminous Sun House is not
a mere book, but a singular world in which the reader comes to
reside, and to feel more alive. Told in rollicking prose laced with
ab-tightening humor and high-lonesome lyricism, this immersive,
sweeping tale locates the grand in the smallest particulars, and
reaches its heights only after traversing the wild and sometimes
steep country of the heart. To open the door to Duncan's
long-awaited masterwork is to be flooded with light and loss, and
to find, ultimately, hard-won hope."--CHRIS DOMBROWSKI, author of
The River You Touch
"This is a classic epic novel with 21st century humor and timeless
spirituality. I laughed so much and cried just as often. It's sexy,
politically astute, visionary, and bold. I love this novel. I love
David. Read it now."--SHERMAN ALEXIE, author of The Absolutely True
Diary of a Part-Time Indian
"Sun House is a book of healing that will earn a place on the shelf
between the world's ancient wisdom texts and Mark Twain...Here is a
book like nothing I have ever read, an epic story about how we may
be made whole in a broken time."--KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE, author of
Earth's Wild Music
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
