TUESDAY EXCERPTS: “OUR SOULS AT NIGHT”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is a recent download, a book I’ve been wanting to read before the movie comes out at the end of the month.  Our Souls at Night, by Kent Haruf, the perfect final installment to this beloved writer’s enduring contribution to American literature.

 

Intro:  And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters.  It was an evening in May just before full dark.

They lived a block apart on Cedar Street in the oldest part of town with elm trees and hackberry and a single maple grown up along the curb and green lawns running back from the sidewalk to the two-story houses.  It had been warm in the day but it had turned off cool now in the evening.  She went along the sidewalk under the trees and turned in at Louis’s house.

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Teaser:  Well, Diane stayed herself anyway, Louis said.  Throughout.  As I say I can appreciate that now.  I didn’t then, at the time.  But we didn’t know anything in our twenties when we were first married.  It was all just instinct and the patterns we’d grown up with.

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Synopsis:  In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf’s inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis’s wife. His daughter lives hours away, her son even farther, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in empty houses, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with. But maybe that could change? As Addie and Louis come to know each other better–their pleasures and their difficulties–a beautiful story of second chances unfolds….

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What do you think?  Do the snippets tempt you to keep reading?

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