Then Came the Evening
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 in the road.
Eighteen years later, Bandy's son -- a stranger bearing his name -- returns to the town, where the memory of his father's crime still hangs thick. When an accident brings the family -- paroled father, widowed mother, injured son -- back together, the three must confront their past, and struggle against their fate.
Like a traditional Greek tragedy, suffused with the mud, ice, and rock of the raw Idaho landscape, Then Came the Evening is tautly plotted and emotionally complex -- a stunning debut.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hart's accomplished debut follows Vietnam vet Bandy Dorner, who wakes up from a drunken bender to discover the cabin he shared with his pregnant wife, Iona, has burned to the ground and she is believed to have died in the fire. After Bandy gets in a scuffle with two policemen that ends with one cop dead and Bandy shot through the shoulder, he learns that Iona has, in fact, left with her lover. Fast forward to 1990, when Bandy's 18-year-old son, Tracy, visits his incarcerated father for the first time and soon moves into Bandy's dead parents' home, intent on fixing it up. After Iona joins Tracy, and Bandy gets released from prison, a brilliant depiction of family follows, though there's a great deal of turbulence before things even hint at coming together. The rugged Idaho backdrop adds sometimes stark, sometimes beautiful counterpoints to the stripped-to-the-bone narrative. Most impressive is Hart's ability to conjure rich and conflicted characters in an uncommon situation; his handling of the material is sublime.
