Colorado, January 1977. Eighty-year-old Edith Goodnough lies in a hospital bed, IV taped to the back of her hand, police officer at her door. She is charged with murder. The clues: a sack of chicken feed slit with a knife, a milky-eyed dog tied outdoors one cold afternoon. The motives: the brutal business of farming and a family code of ethics as unforgiving as the winter prairie itself.
In his critically acclaimed first novel, Kent Haruf delivers the sweeping tale of a woman of the American High Plains, as told by her neighbor, Sanders Roscoe. As Roscoe shares what he knows, Edith's tragedies unfold: a childhood of pre-dawn chores, a mother's death, a violence that leaves a father dependent on his children, forever enraged. Here is the story of a woman who sacrifices her happiness in the name of family -- and then, in one gesture, reclaims her freedom. Breathtaking, determinedly truthful, The Tie That Binds is a powerfully eloquent tribute to the arduous demands of rural America, and of the tenacity of the human spirit.
Editorial Reviews
"An impressive, expertly crafted work of sensitivity and detail....Powerful." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[A] fine first novel that dramatically and accurately explores the lives of people who work the land in the stark American Middle West." --The New York Times Book Review
"Kent Haruf writes so wonderfully....His characters live, and the voice of his narrator reverberates after the last page: humorous, ironic, loving." --The Christian Science Monitor
"Haruf's gifts as a writer go beyond choreography. He has caught his prairie people with the skill of Wright Morris, the prairie itself with the sweeping eye of Willa Cather....[I]t's nearly impossible to believe this is his first novel." --Rocky Mountain News
"[A] fine first novel that dramatically and accurately explores the lives of people who work the land in the stark American Middle West." --The New York Times Book Review
"Kent Haruf writes so wonderfully....His characters live, and the voice of his narrator reverberates after the last page: humorous, ironic, loving." --The Christian Science Monitor
"Haruf's gifts as a writer go beyond choreography. He has caught his prairie people with the skill of Wright Morris, the prairie itself with the sweeping eye of Willa Cather....[I]t's nearly impossible to believe this is his first novel." --Rocky Mountain News
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.
