Loveland by Robert Lukins review – two women reckon with unvoiced terrors in Nebraska

A boathouse by a poisoned lake is one woman’s prison and her granddaughter’s refuge, in a novel that treats both with dignity – and offers no excuses for the men

On my mental bookshelf, Robert Lukins’s debut novella, 2018’s The Everlasting Sunday, sits alongside volumes like Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade: novels of lavish melancholy and human grace. Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog is on that shelf, as is John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, and an obligatory copy of John Williams’s Stoner. Quiet classics.

When The Everlasting Sunday arrived – a tale of outcast boys and a formative 1960s winter – it felt like the book had slipped through some fissure in the space-time continuum, less a new release than a rediscovery. Lukins’s new novel, Loveland, tears the fabric of time open for itself: the past reaches forward; the present reaches back. Reckonings collide.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3QAg0rh
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