Our Souls at Night: A novel Audiobook

Quotes

• More Winesburg that Mayberry, Holt and its residents are shaped by physical solitude and emotional reticence. . . . Haruf's fiction ratifies ordinary, nonflashy decency, but he also knows that even the most placid lives are more complicated than they appear from the outside. . . . The novel is a plainspoken, vernacular farewell.

  — Catherine Holmes, The Charleston Post and Courier

• A fitting close to a storied career, a beautiful rumination on aging, accommodation, and our need to connect. . . . As a meditation on life and forthcoming death, Haruf couldn’t have done any better. He has given us a powerful, pared-down story of two characters who refuse to go gentle into that good night.

  — Lynn Rosen, The Philadelphia Enquirer

• A delicate, sneakily devastating evocation of place and character. . . . Haruf’s story accumulates resonance through carefully chosen details; the novel is quiet but never complacent.

  — The New Yorker

• Elegiac, mournful and compassionate. . .a triumphant end to an inspiring literary career [and] a reminder of a loss on the American cultural landscape, as well as a parting gift from a master storyteller.

  — William J. Cobb, The Dallas Morning News

• A fine and poignant novel that demonstrates that our desire to love and to be loved does not dissolve with age. . . . The story speeds along, almost as if it's a page-turning mystery.

  — Joseph Peschel, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

• By turns amusing and sad, skipping-down-the-sidewalk light and pensive. . . .  I recommend reading it straight through, then sitting in quiet reflection of beautiful literary art.

  — Fred Ohles, The Lincoln Journal Star

• Haruf is never sentimental, and the ending—multiple twists packed into the last twenty pages—is gritty, painful and utterly human. . . . His novels are imbued with an affection and understanding that transform the most mundane details into poetry. Like the friendly light shining from Addie's window, Haruf’s final novel is a beacon of hope; he is sorely missed.

  — Francesca Wade, Financial Times

• Haruf was knows as a great writer and teacher whose work will endure. . . . The cadence of this book is soft and gentle, filled with shy emotion, as tentative as a young person's first kiss—timeless in its beauty. . . . Addie and Louis find a type of love that, as our society ages, ever more people in the baby boom generation may find is the only kind of love that matters.

  — Jim Ewing, The Jackson Clarion-Ledger

• There is so much wisdom in this beautifully pared-back and gentle book. . . a small, quiet gem, written in English so plain that it sparkles.

  — Anne Susskind, The Sydney Morning Herald

• His great subject was the struggle of decency against small-mindedness, and his rare gift was to make sheer decency a moving subject. . . . [This] novel runs on the dogged insistence that simple elements carry depths, and readers will find much to be grateful for.

  — Joan Silber, The New York Times Book Review

• In a fitting and gorgeous end to a body of work that prizes resilience above all else, Haruf has bequeathed readers a map charting a future that is neither easy nor painless, but it’s also not something we have to bear alone.

  — Esquire

• Utterly charming [and] distilled to elemental purity. . . . such a tender, carefully polished work that it seems like a blessing we had no right to expect.

  — Ron Charles, The Washington Post

• Haruf spent a life making art from our blind collisions, and Our Souls at Night is a fitting finish.

  — John Reimringer, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

• Haruf once again banishes doubts.  Our souls can surprise us.  Beneath the surface of reticent lives—and of Haruf’s calm prose—they prove unexpectedly brave.

  — Ann Hulbert, The Atlantic

• Blunt, textured, and dryly humorous. . . this quietly elegiac novel caps a fine, late-blooming and tenacious writing career. . . . Haruf’s gift is to make hay of the unexpected, and it feels like a mercy. . . . This is a novel for just after sunset on a summer’s eve, when the sky is still light and there is much to see, if you are looking.

  — Wingate Packard, The Seattle Times

• A parting gift [and] a reminder of how profoundly we will miss Holt and its people, and Kent Haruf's extraordinary writing.

  — Sandra Dallas, The Denver Post

• Short, spare and moving...Our Souls at Night is already creating a stir.

  — Jennifer Maloney, The Wall Street Journal

• A marvelous addition to his oeuvre. . . . spare but eloquent, bittersweet yet hopeful.

  — Kurt Rabin, The Fredericksburg Freelance-Star

• Lateness—and second chances—have always been a theme for Haruf. But here, in a book about love and the aftermath of grief, in his final hours, he has produced his most intense expression of that yet. . . . Packed into less than 200 pages are all the issues late life provokes.

  — John Freeman, The Boston Globe

• “Short, spare, and moving.”

  — Wall Street Journal

• “Haruf has bequeathed readers a map charting a future that is neither easy nor painless, but it’s also not something we have to bear alone.”

  — Esquire

• “And just like Addie and Louis, Haruf proved that you’re never too old to reinvent yourself, take risks, find love, and write a great novel.”

  — Amazon.com

• “A bittersweet story of companionship, hope and second chances…[and a] tender story of late-life romance.”

  — BookPage

• “Gripping and tender…a sweet love story, a deep friendship…with a stunning sense of all that’s passed and the precious importance of the days that remain.”

  — Publishers Weekly