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"...because when you know people all your life you try to understand how it is for them. What you can't understand you just accept."

Pipes, Geilston Bay. August 2021.

The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf

Despite the arduous and grim lives of the characters within, The Tie That Binds is an extremely gentle novel. There is an ease with which Haruf's prose emerges on the page, a plain-speaking directness that carries significant emotional heft.

Covering 80 years, the novel is a slow burner that starts at the ending, whips back around to the beginning and meanders across a lifetime of (largely) sadness, missed opportunity and resignation to a life suffocated by a hateful and bitter man.

Told in snippets of memories and assumed events, the book bears an elegant sense of time and place rarely seen. The town of Holt, Colorado, is a small but exquisitely realised world. It saddens me to think that Haruf's oeuvre only stretched to six novels, but I am looking forward to reading the four that I haven't read.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

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