Recommendations
Books Like Plainsong by Kent Haruf
For readers of the great Colorado plains novel
If you loved Plainsong — the McPheron brothers taking in Victoria Roubideaux, Tom Guthrie's family managing without their mother, Haruf's spare biblical prose, the specific texture of the Colorado plains — these novels share the same qualities: small communities treated with care and clear eyes, spare or restrained prose, and the extraordinary found in ordinary lives.
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Buy on AmazonEventide
by Kent Haruf
The direct sequel — the McPheron brothers and Victoria in the years after Plainsong; the essential continuation for readers who want to know what became of those characters.
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Buy on AmazonBenediction
by Kent Haruf
The third Holt novel — Dad Lewis dying of cancer; the completion of the Holt trilogy and the most explicit statement of Haruf's themes of mortality, forgiveness, and community.
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Buy on AmazonOur Souls at Night
by Kent Haruf
Haruf's final novel — Addie and Louis in Holt; brief, luminous, the perfect coda to his Holt world; written while Haruf was dying of pulmonary fibrosis and dispensing with everything unnecessary.
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Buy on AmazonGilead
by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the most important literary companion to Plainsong in contemporary American fiction; John Ames's Gilead, Iowa is the theological, more meditative version of Holt, Colorado; both novels are about small midwestern communities sustaining people through their hardest moments.
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Buy on AmazonOlive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in stories — the Maine coastal companion; Crosby, Maine's community is the northeastern version of Holt's community; both novelists are masters of the small-community portrait with spare, precise prose and genuine care for their characters.
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Buy on AmazonEmpire Falls
by Richard Russo
Russo's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about specific small-town communities; where Plainsong is quiet and spare, Empire Falls is comic-tragic and populous; both are fundamentally about what it means to live in a specific American place and the people that place shapes.
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Buy on AmazonThe Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about place as the medium of transformation; Quoyle's Newfoundland and Holt's Colorado plains are both very specific places whose landscape shapes the people who inhabit them.
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Buy on AmazonCrossing to Safety
by Wallace Stegner
Stegner's novel about two academic couples and their long friendship — the companion in American fiction about loyalty, place, and what ordinary lives actually contain; the New England summers are the educated version of what Holt's working-class community represents.
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