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Neverhome

A Novel

Contributors

Read by Mary Stuart Masterson

By Laird Hunt

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Format

She calls herself Ash, but that’s not her real name. She is a farmer’s faithful wife, but she has left her husband to don the uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War. Neverhome tells the harrowing story of Ash Thompson during the battle for the South. Through bloodshed and hysteria and heartbreak, she becomes a hero, a folk legend, a madwoman and a traitor to the American cause.

Laird Hunt’s dazzling novel throws a light on the adventurous women who chose to fight instead of stay behind. It is also a mystery story: why did Ash leave and her husband stay? Why can she not return? What will she have to go through to make it back home?

In gorgeous prose, Hunt’s rebellious young heroine fights her way through history, and back home to her husband, and finally into our hearts.

  • "Laird Hunt's new novel is a beguiling and evocative story about love and loss, duty and deceit. Through the assured voice of his narrator and the subtle beauty of his writing, Neverhometook me on a journey so thoroughly engrossed that there were times the pages seemed to turn themselves."
    Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds
  • "A spare, beautiful novel, so deeply about America and the language of America that its sentences seem to rise up from the earth itself. Laird Hunt had me under his spell from the first word of Neverhome to the last. Magnificent."
    Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy and Report from the Interior
  • "The Civil War has given us so many great literary works that I couldn't have imagined a new fictional approach that was both stunningly original and yet utterly natural, even inevitable. But this is just what Laird Hunt brilliantly delivers in his new novel. The key is his central character: in her voice, her personality, her yearning, she deeply touches our shared and enduring humanity. Neverhome is masterful work by one of our finest writers."
    Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

On Sale
Sep 9, 2014
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781478982043


Laird Hunt

About the Author

Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from the French. A 2024 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction, he is also the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Bridge Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner and the Prix Femina Étranger. Hunt’s reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.

Learn more about this author