Description

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A riveting, psychologically rich family drama set in the American West, from a writer who has been compared to Cormac McCarthy.

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 on the road.

Eighteen years later, Bandy is released from prison. His parents are gone, but on the derelict family ranch, Bandy faces a different reunion. Tracy, his now teenaged son, has come to claim the father he’s never known. Iona, Bandy’s ex-wife, has returned on the heels of her son. All three are damaged, hardened, haunted. But warily, desperately, they move in a slow dance around each other, trying to piece back together a family that never was; trying to discover if they belong together at all.

With unflinching honesty and restrained beauty, Brian Hart explores the possibilities and limitations of his characters as they struggle toward a shared future. Like a traditional Greek tragedy, suffused with the mud, ice, and rock of the raw I daho landscape, Then Came the Evening is tautly plotted and emotionally complex—a stunning debut.

About the Author

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Born in Idaho, Brian Hart spent years working as a janitor, carpenter, welder, and commercial fisherman before earning his M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the winner of the 2006 Keene Prize, the largest student prize for literature at the University of Texas.

Praise for Then Came the Evening…

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“Compelling, beginning to end... Hart, who's been compared to Cormac McCarthy, has a keen sense of that small, dark margin between the rock and the hard place, and that's where he puts his characters to sort out their lives.”—Oregonian “[A] quietly exceptional début novel[.] The author is... an astute observer of the transitional Western landscape.”—New Yorker “[An] accomplished debut... a brilliant depiction of family... 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.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “This novel's finely detailed episodes of physical and emotional violence bring to mind the works of Larry Brown, while its lyrical descriptions speak of landscape and rural community life like the books of Robert Morgan.  Hart explores, with brutal honesty and a delicate respect for the strength of the individual spirit, the human needs for love, for continuity after death, and for redemption. His depiction of the effects of poverty, violence, and drugs on the human spirit is acute and poignant.”—Booklist "Hart's evocative debut traces the long descent of a tragic Western figure straight out of a Sam Shepard play... Desiccated descriptions of a long-fallow landscape and the author's ability to conjure up the ghosts of a low man's past further enrich this heartbreaking, convicing drama. A haunting Western tale."—Kirkus Reviews

“Brian Hart’s Then Came the Evening shows us the hidden America, a world of remote holdings, long memories, fierce yearnings, and violent strivings. He dramatizes this world with an immense care and tenderness. There is a deep feeling in the book for the gnarled landscape itself, its stark beauty, but even greater emotion surrounds the characters that inhabit it. Their efforts to live together and love each other are depicted with a grace and understanding which is rare and memorable.”—Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

“Then Came the Evening is an edgy and affecting debut from a writer already bursting with promise and achievement. Brian Hart’s narrative voice is as tender as it is unflinching—and his novel of love squandered and oh-so-nearly retrieved is a triumph.” —Jim Crace, author of Quarantine and Being Dead

“Brian Hart has written a remarkable first novel—violent and tender, harsh yet beautiful. Sentence for sentence, no other young writer I know can match him … Then Came the Evening will break your heart.”—James Magnuson, director of the Michener Center for Writers and author of Windfall and The Hounds of Winter

“Then Came the Evening is an important book, a novel of raging velocity and blazing empathy, a mature achievement. Brian Hart knows everything about his rural western setting, everything about his short-on-luck characters, and everything about making a reader turn the pages. This is a first novel written with a master's skill.”—Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo and Challenger Park

“Brian Hart’s Then Came the Evening is composed of equal parts science—a scrupulous exactitude for place and the emotions it evokes—and art—the astonishing deftness of its telling. Palpable always, and ultimately poignant, is its reverence for the physical world and its acknowledgment of the violence we do to it, to each other and to ourselves, and its wise and unflinching rendering of that mysterious gulf between who we are and who we wish to be. Here is a novel that will stick with you like a song, and needle you awake in the middle of the night.”—Michael Parker, author of If You Want Me to Stay

"Brian Hart’s considerable genius is that he sees what the rest of us are unwilling to see and says what we are unable to say. Then Came the Evening is both harrowing and haunting, hypnotic and exhilarating. Hart can flat-out tell a story. He’s savvy, insightful, and fearless … What talent, what nerve, what an achingly beautiful and astonishing first novel."—John Dufresne, author of Requiem, Mass.: A Novel