Neverhome

A spare, beautiful novel, so deeply about America and the language of America that its sentences seem to rise up from the earth itself. Laird Hunt had me under his spell from the first word of Neverhome to the last. Magnificent

Paul Auster

Neverhome is a wondrous feat. Few novels written in English approach its linguistic verve

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

The Civil War has given us so many great literary works that I couldn't have imagined a new fictional approach that was both stunningly original and yet utterly natural, even inevitable. But this is just what Laird Hunt brilliantly delivers in his new novel. The key is his central character: in her voice, her personality, her yearning, she deeply touches our shared and enduring humanity. Neverhome is masterful work by one of our finest writers

Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

With nothing but the simple language of well-worn words, Mr Hunt has conjured up a wholly original heroine with an utterly fresh voice... A book that deserves a wider readership.

The Economist

Hunt brings an especially bittersweet and lyrical tone to this forgotten part of Civil War history and gives to several hundred women who did indeed make the momentous decision to fight….An amazing book

Library Journal

An exquisitely wrought vision of the terrible ravages of war - on the land, on the human body, and on the mind

Booklist

This is a slim and unshowy story of devastating power, an epic poem in its own vernacular, an upside-down Odyssey at once particular and hauntingly universal. Quietly, relentlessly, without wasting a word, it works its way under the skin and into the marrow of the bones... Hunt has coaxed a brilliant and breathtaking blaze of a novel.

Clare Clark, Guardian

Staggering... he reinvigorates the American language with a poetic urgency equal to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The story is strong, the prose superbly wrought.

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

A beguiling and evocative story about love and loss, duty and deceit... Neverhome took me on a journey so thoroughly engrossed that there were times the pages seemed to turn themselves.

Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds