Synopses & Reviews
A riveting, psychologically rich family drama set in the American West, from a writer who has been compared to Cormac McCarthy.
Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding on the road.
Eighteen years later, Bandy is released from prison. His parents are gone, but on the derelict family ranch, Bandy faces a different reunion. Tracy, his now teenaged son, has come to claim the father he's never known. Iona, Bandy's ex-wife, has returned on the heels of her son. All three are damaged, hardened, haunted. But warily, desperately, they move in a slow dance around each other, trying to piece back together a family that never was; trying to discover if they belong together at all.
With unflinching honesty and restrained beauty, Brian Hart explores the possibilities and limitations of his characters as they struggle toward a shared future. Like a traditional Greek tragedy, suffused with the mud, ice, and rock of the raw I daho landscape, Then Came the Evening is tautly plotted and emotionally complex — a stunning debut.
Review
"Desiccated descriptions of a long-fallow landscape and the author's ability to conjure up the ghosts of a low man's past further enrich this heartbreaking, convincing drama. A haunting Western tale about one man's inescapable sorrow." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"This unusually accomplished debut will appeal to readers who like their literary writing with a punch — drugs, violence, and harsh language abound — and redemption doesn't necessarily come to everyone who seeks it." Booklist
Review
"Hart refuses to tie up everything neatly, and that's what makes this novel so appealing. Highly recommended to readers of good literary fiction." Library Journal
Review
"Brian Hart's Then Came the Evening shows us the hidden America, a world of remote holdings, long memories, fierce yearnings, and violent strivings. He dramatizes this world with an immense care and tenderness. There is a deep feeling in the book for the gnarled landscape itself, its stark beauty, but even greater emotion surrounds the characters that inhabit it. Their efforts to live together and love each other are depicted with a grace and understanding which is rare and memorable." Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
Review
"Then Came the Evening is an edgy and affecting debut from a writer already bursting with promise and achievement. Brian Hart's narrative voice is as tender as it is unflinching — and his novel of love squandered and oh-so-nearly retrieved is a triumph." Jim Crace, author of Quarantine and Being Dead
About the Author
Born in Idaho, Brian Hart spent years working as a janitor, carpenter, welder, and commercial fisherman before earning his M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the winner of the 2006 Keene Prize, the largest student prize for literature at the University of Texas.