"One of the greatest imaginative achievements I’ve encountered in a lifetime of reading--brimming with invention, mirth, and wisdom. It transports us into a world more radiant and vivid than this one, or rather one just as radiant and vivid, if only we attended to it with the heightened awareness it urges us to cultivate."—
WILLIAM DEBUYS, author of The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss"This is a classic epic novel with 21st century humor and timeless spirituality. I laughed so much and cried just as often. It’s sexy, politically astute, visionary, and bold. I love this novel. I love David. Read it now."—
SHERMAN ALEXIE, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian"
Sun House is a book of healing that will earn a place on the shelf between the world’s ancient wisdom texts and Mark Twain...Here is a book like nothing I have ever read, an epic story about how we may be made whole in a broken time."—
KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE, author of Earth's Wild Music“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“Reading
Sun House is like watching dawn in the high country. A clear, eastern light gains strength as the story unfolds, revealing a landscape as vast and gorgeous as any mountain range at daybreak. On this bright stage, David James Duncan’s unlikely, perfectly-wrought, beloved characters perform a miracle: From ragged strands of tragedy and epiphany, they weave the fabric of a more openhearted world.”—
BRYCE ANDREWS, author of Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West“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"
Sun House is a cathedral, a high-domed room of stories the reader enters and never fully leaves...a profound gift to readers (like me) who hunger for the insights of ancient texts but lack the appetite to read them on my own."—
HANK LENTFER, author of Raven’s Witness and Faith of Cranes“Asian wisdom traditions and an Emersonian reverence for what can be learned from nature have always suffused Duncan’s work, but in
Sun House they are front and center on nearly every page.”—
John Williams,
The Washington Post“The time, energy, focus, precision, invention, scholarship, fun, joy, love, courage and compassion that went into making this novel boggle my mind…Just contemplating its creation is something of a spiritual journey in itself. Finding this kind of expansive refreshment at this most narrow-minded moment in history is a gift.”—
RICHARD POWERS for The Washington Post"
[Sun House] feels both capacious
and tightly packed, as musical and shimmering as its title suggests. It is the product of long workdays, seismic struggles both personal and global — and a level of compassion and spirituality that transcends all of it."—
Maggie Neal Doherty,
Los Angeles Times"Set within a hauntingly beautiful landscape,
Sun House presents a rare version of the American West, one teeming with mysticism, yearning, and compassion."—
Alta“Duncan’s sprawling new novel blends frustration with the divine, strange moments of random chance and the search for community. It’s an epic read to tackle as the summer starts to wind down.”—
Tobias Carroll,
Inside Hook"
Sun House is a voluminous chronicle of a specific time in American history . . . As is the trademark of his fiction, Duncan’s spotlight shines brightest on the in-betweens and exceptions in religious tradition, the cracks."—
Jessie van Eerden,
Commonweal Magazine"[
Sun House is] a cosmic trip that braids together a dozen lives that cross and gurgle like the fictional Elkmoon River."—
Outside, Best Books of FallPraise for The Brothers K: "A stunning work: a complex tapestry of family tensions, baseball, politics and religion, by turns hilariously funny and agonizingly sad."—
Publishers Weekly“Duncan’s prose is a blend of lyrical rhapsody, sassy hyperbole and all-American vernacular.”—
San Francisco Chronicle"An irreverent, offbeat and thoroughly likable tale."—
Los Angeles Times"The Brothers K succeeds on almost every level and every page."—
USA TodayPraise for The River Why: "A whirlwind, madcap, humorous and sensitive novel."—
New York Times
