Zorrie Spiral-Bound | 2021-02-09
Laird Hunt
Zorrie
"It was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew."
As a girl, Zorrie Underwood's modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents to diphtheria, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material.
But when Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finally finds the love and community that have eluded her in the small town of Hillisburg. And yet, even as she tries to build a new life, Zorrie discovers that her trials have only begun.
Spanning an entire lifetime, a life convulsed and transformed by the events of the 20th century, Laird Hunt's extraordinary novel offers a profound and intimate portrait of the dreams that propel one tenacious woman onward and the losses that she cannot outrun. Set against a harsh, gorgeous, quintessentially American landscape, this is a deeply empathetic and poetic novel that belongs on a shelf with the classics of Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout.
"Zorrie is a quiet novel about an ordinary life. And when you're ordinary, you need resilience like Zorrie's to survive in an uncaring world. Laird Hunt's short and affecting novel follows Zorrie Underwood's life from childhood in Depression-era Indiana, when she's orphaned, to early adulthood, when she's left on her own, to an eventual marriage and working life." --O Magazine's Most Anticipated Historical Fiction Novels of 2021
"Laird Hunt's Zorrie is compelling from its first page, the prosody like a 'bolt of crinoline and serge and silk.' Zorrie is 'no giant,' but her life is as full and satisfying as the short novel, fecund with grain and clover, sweetgrass and damp earth, love, loss, and radiant Luna dust. I read it, with great pleasure, in one sitting." --Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of Heads of the Colored People
"Hunt celebrates the majesty and depth in a life that may superficially seem undistinguished. . . With compassion and realism, Hunt recounts Zorrie's story straightforwardly, with setting-appropriate dialogue and an eye for sensory details. . . A beautifully written ode to the rural Midwest." --Booklist
"Hunt's storytelling flows smoothly, its rhythms unperturbed by preciousness or superfluous detail. Fans of Kent Haruf's Plainsong trilogy will love this subtle tale of rural life." --Publishers Weekly
"Quietly effective. [Hunt's] often lyrical prose traces Zorrie's hopes, griefs, loneliness, and resolve with remarkable economy . . . A touching, tightly woven story from an always impressive author." --Kirkus, starred review
"Zorrie lives and breathes, as a character and as a book. In its natural movement, its joys embraced and sorrows faced, it is a moving portrait of one woman's life--and so, by extension, a portrait of all of our lives. Laird Hunt has such a gift for clear and precise language, for conjuring the details that matter; the rhythms of mid-century mid-America are brought into being with subtle power. Eerily lit, at times, by a radium glow, this is a luminous book." --Erica Wagner, author of Chief Engineer
"Rarely, a voice so compels it's as if we're furtively eavesdropping on a whispered confession, which is how I felt reading Neverhome." --New York Times Book Review
"Neverhome surely joins the ranks of the brilliant novels not just of the Civil War but of war writ large." --USA Today
"Exhilarating… Neverhome moves forward with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy." --Los Angeles Times
"Hunt is an extraordinary, original writer." --Dallas Morning News