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Praise for Before We Sleep
From other writers: "Jeffrey Lent has quietly created some of the finest novels of our new century. This beautifully written novel depicts familial and generational conflicts without accusation of condescension, becoming a profound depiction of mid-twentieth-century America." -Ron Rash "Jeffrey Lent builds characters and their world like a painter layering his canvas, telling his story but substantiating it with color and light. I fell in love with Katey Snow bravely stepping out of small-town restrictions into the newly fashioned possibilities of the late sixties; and with Oliver Snow, who's done the opposite: stepped back into the shadows, yet given as much tenderness and love to Ruth and Katey as any man could." -Tim Pears "Sentence by sentence rural New England comes alive, and Lent's language draws you in like a clear stream in summer." -Tim Gautreaux Pre-Publication Reviews: "Lent, a quiety bold writer who rarely takes the expected path, makes this novel as much about mothers and daughters as about men and war...The interplay between their stories makes for a heartbreaking examination of the fraught bonds of kinship and community. Beautifully written and powerfully compassionate: more fine work from a modern master." -Kirkus Reviews "Shifting between the end of the war and the political fallout of the following decades, Lent draws a parallel across time, connecting the vastly different yet similar lives of a mother and daughter each struggling to find her way through the secrets that have defined her-often not through their own doing. Lent's fine prose depicts the touching physical and emotional journeys of the Snow family against a backdrop of the magical New England landscape." -Publisher's Weekly "Elegiac...Chronicling Katey's parents' fledgling marriage with piercing acuity, Lent devotes half the narrative to that earlier generation...Luxurious and deliberate...For admirers of Emma Cline's The Girls,here is a less sensational but worthy companion." -Library Journal |
Photo Credit: Myra Hudson
