Synopses & Reviews
For as long as she can remember, Susan Dunn has been trying to escape. But peace and happiness have always eluded her — now an adjunct professor, she is tortured by the novel she cannot finish, and a lack of feeling toward a husband who loves her. Just when she's ready to abandon everything to try again, she receives a letter that forces her to reckon with the trauma that first sent her running: her mother's murder at the hands of her father, Daniel Ahearn, forty years ago.
Daniel, out of prison and living a spartan life, has written Susan with his dying wish: to see her for the first time since a policeman tore her from his arms. But does she want to see him, and confront the reason he's been gone so long? What could Daniel possibly offer the daughter he robbed of a family? As the story moves toward a possible reunion, it pulses with emotion, probing the limits of our capacity to forgive. Like Dubus's award-winning Townie and House of Sand and Fog, Gone So Long is a profound exploration of the struggle between our best intentions and most mercurial desires.
Review
"Dubus evokes a dazzling palette of emotions as he skillfully unpacks the psychological tensions between remorse and guilt, fear and forgiveness, anger and love....Heartrending yet unsentimental, this powerful testament to the human spirit asks what it means to atone for the unforgivable and to empathize with the broken." American Library Association
Review
"Though the entire cast is vividly drawn, perhaps most impressive is how Dubus elicits sympathy in the reader for Danny, whose life effectively ended the moment he picked up the knife. This is a compassionate and wonderful novel." Publishers Weekly
Review
"I tore through this haunting novel about people driven by pain beyond the reach of love and forgiveness, and the roads they use as they seek their way back. It hits just the right note at the end, and I'll be thinking about Susan a long time. A hell of a read." Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment
About the Author
Andre Dubus III is the author of Gone So Long, Dirty Love, The Garden of Last Days, House of Sand and Fog (a #1 New York Times bestseller, Oprah's Book Club pick, and finalist for the National Book Award), and Townie, winner of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His writing has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
Andre Dubus III on PowellsBooks.Blog
My new novel,
Gone So Long, begins from the point of view of a dying man in his 60s, a man who — when he was in his 20s — did the worst thing possible to another human being, the mother of his child, and now 40 years have come and gone, and he has not seen this child since she was three, and now she’s 43...
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