DECEMBER 2014 - AudioFile
Laird Hunt’s lyrical prose delivers the story of Constance "Ash" Thompson, a woman who takes her husband’s place and fights in the Civil War. Narrator Mary Stuart Masterson offers a finely crafted portrait. She makes it clear that where Ash is intrepid, Bartholomew, her husband, is fearful. She makes it seem natural that Ash should go to war, leaving Bartholomew to tend the farm. Disguised as a man, Ash carries off the masquerade, enduring atrocities and horrors until she’s betrayed. Masterson’s performance grows even more intense when, because it is believed that no sane woman would cross-dress, Ash is institutionalized, humiliated, and tortured. Hunt’s impeccable research provides insight into society’s historically restrictive gender attitudes, and Masterson’s performance keeps the energy high and the characters believable. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
"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, author of The New York Trilogy and Report from the Interior
"In fiercely gorgeous prose, Laird Hunt's Neverhome traces the mesmerizing odyssey of a singular woman, who stretches and shimmers from these pages, and stakes a piercing claim on our hearts. You won't soon forget Ash Thompson's voice or this astonishing novel."—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife
"Laird Hunt's new novel is a beguiling and evocative story about love and loss, duty and deceit. Through the assured voice of his narrator and the subtle beauty of his writing, 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
"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 the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Paul Auster
"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."
Sam Lipsyte
"Laird Hunt is an extraordinary writer."
Michael Ondaatje
"There is always a surprise in the voice and in the heart of Laird Hunt's stories--with its echoes of habit caught in a timeless dialect, so we see the world he gives us as if new."
DECEMBER 2014 - AudioFile
Laird Hunt’s lyrical prose delivers the story of Constance "Ash" Thompson, a woman who takes her husband’s place and fights in the Civil War. Narrator Mary Stuart Masterson offers a finely crafted portrait. She makes it clear that where Ash is intrepid, Bartholomew, her husband, is fearful. She makes it seem natural that Ash should go to war, leaving Bartholomew to tend the farm. Disguised as a man, Ash carries off the masquerade, enduring atrocities and horrors until she’s betrayed. Masterson’s performance grows even more intense when, because it is believed that no sane woman would cross-dress, Ash is institutionalized, humiliated, and tortured. Hunt’s impeccable research provides insight into society’s historically restrictive gender attitudes, and Masterson’s performance keeps the energy high and the characters believable. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2014-07-01
A novel that takes us there and back again, "there" being the Civil War and back again, a farm in Indiana.Constance "Ash" Thompson and her husband, Bartholomew, are a young couple with a farm, though their roles are a bit inverted, for Ash is fearless and a crack shot while Bartholomew has bad vision and is much more timid. Ash feels strongly about supporting the Union cause, but one of them has to stay home and tend the crops and animals, so Ash enlists and passes for a male soldier. She narrates her adventures crisply and matter-of-factly as she goes through her slapdash basic training and soon finds herself at the Battle of Antietam. She becomes expert in carrying off her role as a man, spitting and cursing with the boys but also showing herself invaluable as a marksman (even when this only involves foraging for squirrels to make a stew). Eventually, Ash is betrayed by someone she thought she could trust, and she finds the battle is not the most difficult challenge she faces, for rumor has it that a "whore from Chattanooga" has been dressing up as a man and infiltrating Union lines. When she persuades an officer that she's neither a whore nor a spy, she's incarcerated in an asylum, for it's concluded that lunacy is the only other possible cause for her cross-dressing. After suffering abundant humiliations at the hands of a female "keeper," Ash cleverly (and ironically) escapes by switching clothes with a Union guard. By this time, she's determined to get home to Bartholomew—and she does—only to find that some local thugs have taken over the farm. Of course, she vows vengeance, though this revenge is exacted in a way that leads to tragedy. While comparisons to Cold Mountain are inevitable, Ash's journey has its own integrity. Hunt keeps the pace brisk and inserts some new feminist twists into the genre of the Civil War odyssey.
