In this exquisitely rendered, poignant story of two older people, Addie Moore and Louis Waters, we find two people who are lonely in their isolation, estranged in a sense from those who belong to them and to whom they belong, and looking for some sort of meaningful connection.īut in the often closeminded small town of Holt, Colorado, the setting for all of Haruf’s books, openness to the new and the transformative is not exactly common, and when Addie suggests to Louis that they spend their nights together in chaste and platonic companionship, many people think it scandalous or risky, an abrogation of propriety and good, decent social behvaiour. While Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls at Night, wasn’t written with the status quo-busting messiness of the pandemic in mind – the author penned the short but powerful novel in 2014 shortly before his death, with the book published posthumously in 2015 – it does go deep into the heart of one of the central themes of recent times, belonging and connection, both of which have proven difficult to keep alive when social gatherings, travel and physical intimacy have been in soul-sapping short supply. Happiness has been in short supply over the last couple of years as the COVID pandemic has run rife through once iron-clad certainties and disrupted lives in ways that were unpredictable and often unceasing. (cover image courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
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