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Sun House

Written by: David James Duncan
Narrated by: Robb Moreira, Barrie Kreinik, Elena Rey, Henry Leyva, Mark Bedard, L. J. Ganser, Jenn Lee, Joseph Discher
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Publisher's Summary

An epic comedy about love, spirit, and the quest for transcendence in an anything-but-transcendent America, from the author of the perennial cult bestsellers The River Why and The Brothers K.

A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit Jesuit into crisis. A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.

The journeys of this unintentional menagerie carry them to the healing lands of Montana and a newly founded community—where nothing tastes better than Maker's Mark mixed with glacier ice, and nothing seems less likely than the soul-filling delight a troupe of spiritual refugees, urban sophisticates, road-weary musicians, and local cowboys begin to find in each other's company.

With Sun House, David James Duncan continues exploring the American search for meaning and love that he began in his acclaimed novels The River Why and The Brothers K. This stunning novel, set amid the gorgeous landscapes of the American West, illuminates the contemporary world through the prisms of Eastern wisdom, cast-off ecstatic religious ideals, and the unpredictable, expansive yearnings of the human heart.

©2023 David James Duncan (P)2023 Little, Brown & Company

What the critics say

“Like all truly extraordinary novels, the luminous Sun House is not a mere book, but a singular world in which the reader comes to reside, and to feel more alive. Told in rollicking prose laced with ab-tightening humor and high-lonesome lyricism, this immersive, sweeping tale locates the grand in the smallest particulars, and reaches its heights only after traversing the wild and sometimes steep country of the heart. To open the door to Duncan’s long-awaited masterwork is to be flooded with light and loss, and to find, ultimately, hard-won hope.”—CHRIS DOMBROWSKI, author of The River You Touch

“There are books that make you a happy insomniac and Sun House is absolutely one of them, like Quixote or Moby or Copperfield, the kind when you wake at three in the morning you remember that beside the bed is a thousand-room mansion of a novel, where every door opens to unexpected weather and a keen sense of appetite. Here is the best part: while these characters come in all shades of funny and searching and rueful and indignant, they are all right there and as wide awake as you are. A new big book from David James Duncan? This is a lucky time to be a reader.”—LEIF ENGER, author of Peace Like a River

"Jim Harrison meets Robert M. Pirsig, Timothy Leary, and the Dalai Lama in Duncan’s long-awaited follow-up to The River Why (1983) and The Brothers K (1992)...arch and bookish (Gary Snyder makes a cameo appearance), [Sun House] will prove captivating to those who enjoy novels of ideas—in this case, one that modernizes the Western by injecting it with ethnic diversity and doses of philosophy (and LSD, even)...a book by a first-rate writer and one to be savored."—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

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