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“I can’t get more than a few pages into a novel
unless the prose is good. In Mark Spragg’s An
Unfinished Life, the writing is of considerable grace and beauty, plus
there’s a compelling tale of the New West which at times is an uncomfortable
page turner where you are standing on the sidelines rooting for your heartbreaking
favorites.”
— Jim Harrison
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“Mark Spragg invents characters that are as richly
drawn and lovingly rendered as the landscape in which he sets them down. An Unfinished Life is honest, engaged,
deeply satisfying, and full of an uncanny grace that resides both in the beauty
of the language and in these valuable lives.”
— Pam Houston
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“An Unfinished
Life has dysfunction and menace and clipped, big-sky dialogue that’s as
spare as Cormac McCarthy’s work but with a warmer patina. The carefully placed
story hides surprising flashes of humor inside telling detail.”
— USA Today
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“Spragg, with consummate skill, uses people and
places we don’t know to teach us something about ourselves. He explores human
bonds, the difficulty of core change, and ultimately the need for forgiveness
if a person is to be emotionally whole…An
Unfinished Life is a deft contemplation of completion, of change, and of
coming home.”
— Denver Post
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“Intensely human, gently probing the longing for
family and the inescapable grip of the past. Swiftly shifting perspectives lend
the novel a pleasing dynamism.”
— Christian Science Monitor
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“Rich with ancillary characters worked into his
elaborate plots…When all the scattered elements of the story coalesce in
strange and wondrous ways, so logical yet so unexpected, we are tempted to use
a western idiom and state that Mark Spragg has put his brand on realistic
Western novels in our time.”
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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“One of those once-in-a-blue-moon type novels that
takes convention and stands it on its head…Filled with often poetic meditations
about the love we hold for those who have died—what sort of role their memories
play in our lives—and the importance of laying the past to rest while moving
into the future.”
— St. Petersburg Times
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“The tension lies in the interior life Spragg
creates for his characters. They are believably raw and wounded. And, above
all, redeemable.”
— New York Daily News
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“Spragg writes in the man’s man literary school of
Hemingway and Tom McGuane, where valor, brevity, and minor epiphanies still
count for something, yet An Unfinished
Life’s strength lies in its characters. It’s best one is the irrepressible
little girl, Griff, barely beating out the two old coots, bitter Einar and
handicapped Mitch, who talk with winning honesty while struggling through their
ablutions and medical ministrations…An
Unfinished Life makes you yearn for more of these characters and their
prescient talk.”
— Oregonian
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“Ever since I became the books editor at the Kansas City Star in March 2000, folks
have been asking me to recommend a reading experience as clean and sharp as
Kent Haruf’s Plainsong…Finally, I
have an answer. His name is Mark Spragg, his new novel is An Unfinished Life.”
— John Mark Eberhart, Kansas City Star