"One of the greatest imaginative achievements I’ve encountered in a lifetime of reading—brimming with invention, mirth, and wisdom. It transports us into a world more radiant and vivid than this one, or rather one just as radiant and vivid, if only we attended to it with the heightened awareness it urges us to cultivate."—WILLIAM DEBUYS, author of The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss SHERMAN ALEXIE, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Sun House is a book of healing that will earn a place on the shelf between the world’s ancient wisdom texts and Mark Twain...Here is a book like nothing I have ever read, an epic story about how we may be made whole in a broken time."—KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE, author of Earth's Wild Music Sun House is not a mere book, but a singular world in which the reader comes to reside, and to feel more alive. Told in rollicking prose laced with ab-tightening humor and high-lonesome lyricism, this immersive, sweeping tale locates the grand in the smallest particulars, and reaches its heights only after traversing the wild and sometimes steep country of the heart. To open the door to Duncan’s long-awaited masterwork is to be flooded with light and loss, and to find, ultimately, hard-won hope.”—CHRIS DOMBROWSKI, author of The River You Touch Sun House is like watching dawn in the high country. A clear, eastern light gains strength as the story unfolds, revealing a landscape as vast and gorgeous as any mountain range at daybreak. On this bright stage, David James Duncan’s unlikely, perfectly-wrought, beloved characters perform a miracle: From ragged strands of tragedy and epiphany, they weave the fabric of a more openhearted world.”—BRYCE ANDREWS, author of Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West Sun House is absolutely one of them, like Quixote or Moby or Copperfield, the kind when you wake at three in the morning you remember that beside the bed is a thousand-room mansion of a novel, where every door opens to unexpected weather and a keen sense of appetite. Here is the best part: while these characters come in all shades of funny and searching and rueful and indignant, they are all right there and as wide awake as you are. A new big book from David James Duncan? This is a lucky time to be a reader.”—LEIF ENGER, author of Peace Like a River
"Jim Harrison meets Robert M. Pirsig, Timothy Leary, and the Dalai Lama in Duncan’s long-awaited follow-up to The River Why (1983) and The Brothers K (1992)...arch and bookish (Gary Snyder makes a cameo appearance), [Sun House ] will prove captivating to those who enjoy novels of ideas—in this case, one that modernizes the Western by injecting it with ethnic diversity and doses of philosophy (and LSD, even)...a book by a first-rate writer and one to be savored."
—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW Sun House is a cathedral, a high-domed room of stories the reader enters and never fully leaves...a profound gift to readers (like me) who hunger for the insights of ancient texts but lack the appetite to read them on my own."—HANK LENTFER, author of Raven’s Witness and Faith of Cranes Sun House they are front and center on nearly every page.”—John Williams , The Washington Post RICHARD POWERS for The Washington Post [Sun House ] feels both capacious and tightly packed, as musical and shimmering as its title suggests. It is the product of long workdays, seismic struggles both personal and global — and a level of compassion and spirituality that transcends all of it."—Maggie Neal Doherty , Los Angeles Times Sun House ] takes as many turns as Missoula’s Rattlesnake Creek, all the while celebrating the extraordinary power of community."—Debra Magpie Earling , The New York Times Sun House presents a rare version of the American West, one teeming with mysticism, yearning, and compassion."—Alta Tobias Carroll , Inside Hook Sun House is a voluminous chronicle of a specific time in American history . . . As is the trademark of his fiction, Duncan’s spotlight shines brightest on the in-betweens and exceptions in religious tradition, the cracks."—Jessie van Eerden , Commonweal Magazine Sun House is] a cosmic trip that braids together a dozen lives that cross and gurgle like the fictional Elkmoon River."—Outside, Best Books of Fall Sun House ] is to fall in love with its myriad characters as they move through their own versions of walking a spiritual path. It’s a rare novel that can hold up under the sheer weight of so many fully drawn and endlessly fascinating characters. Sun House doesn’t just hold the weight, it floats and even soars with it."—Marc Beaudin , Big Sky Journal Sun House ] is what might colloquially be called a yarn. Like the best-told folk tales in every culture, the story is an adventure, a comedy and what could be called a teaching moment. Indeed, a moment we can all learn from."—Ron Jacobs , Counterpunch Sun House quickly envelopes readers in language that offers up new ways of thinking. There’s an honorable gentleness in the characters that engenders a longing to understand our fellow humans...The novel creates an immersive experience with its thin, Bible-like pages and various font treatments that indicate journal entries and dream sequences, different tones of voice, and winding narration, which makes reading feel akin to following a snaking river."—Anna Paige , MONTANA FREE PRESS
★ 2023-05-09The River Why (1983) and The Brothers K (1992).
An inch-long steel bolt separates from an airplane and falls to Earth, where it “embed[s] itself in the skull of an eight-year-old girl hoeing weeds with her widower father in a Mexican cornfield, killing her almost instantly.” So improbable is this occurrence that it has to be more than chance, an assassination on the part of some jealous or malicious god. So thinks a fallen Jesuit, one of several characters in Duncan’s vast novel who suffer a crisis of faith—and who fall into each other’s orbit in a breathtakingly beautiful Montana valley that’s full of heartbreaking possibilities. The first major player we meet is a footloose actor whose mother died on his fifth birthday, a source of psyche-snapping grief for the rest of his life. In time, he falls in with another wounded bird, a Sanskrit student who is impossibly learned courtesy of her similarly brilliant if emotionally unavailable father, who, for reasons that unfold over hundreds of pages, turns out to be the reason Montana figures in the story at all. Duncan’s characters suffer pain, loss, death, all the makings of Buddhist samsara that fuel our Sanskritist’s weary mistrust of the world. Though of Michener length, the story is talky and without much action; Duncan writes page after page to describe even the smallest incidents, as with his long and quite shattering disquisition on the death of a beloved dog. Yet that talk, arch and bookish (Gary Snyder makes a cameo appearance), will prove captivating to those who enjoy novels of ideas—in this case, one that modernizes the Western by injecting it with ethnic diversity and doses of philosophy (and LSD, even).
For all its excesses, a book by a first-rate writer and one to be savored.
This is a classic epic novel with twenty-first-century humor and timeless spirituality. I laughed so much and cried just as often. It’s sexy, politically astute, visionary, and bold…Read it now.
New York Times bestselling author Sherman Alexie
One of the greatest imaginative achievements I’ve encountered in a lifetime of reading.”
author of The Trail to Kanjiroba William duBuys
There are books that make you a happy insomniac and Sun House is absolutely one of them, like Quixote or Moby or Copperfield, the kind when you wake at three in the morning you remember that beside the bed is a thousand-room mansion of a novel, where every door opens to unexpected weather and a keen sense of appetite. Here is the best part: while these characters come in all shades of funny and searching and rueful and indignant, they are all right there and as wide awake as you are. A new big book from David James Duncan? This is a lucky time to be a reader.
author of Peace Like a River LEIF ENGER
Duncan’s prose is a blend of lyrical rhapsody, sassy hyperbole and all-American vernacular.
"The Brothers K succeeds on almost every level and every page.
Sun House is a cathedral, a high-domed room of stories the reader enters and never fully leaves...a profound gift to readers (like me) who hunger for the insights of ancient texts but lack the appetite to read them on my own.
author of Raven’s Witness and Faith of Crane HANK LENTFER
One of the greatest imaginative achievements I’ve encountered in a lifetime of reading—brimming with invention, mirth, and wisdom. It transports us into a world more radiant and vivid than this one, or rather one just as radiant and vivid, if only we attended to it with the heightened awareness it urges us to cultivate.
author of The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscoverin WILLIAM DEBUYS
Like all truly extraordinary novels, the luminous Sun House is not a mere book, but a singular world in which the reader comes to reside, and to feel more alive. Told in rollicking prose laced with ab-tightening humor and high-lonesome lyricism, this immersive, sweeping tale locates the grand in the smallest particulars, and reaches its heights only after traversing the wild and sometimes steep country of the heart. To open the door to Duncan’s long-awaited masterwork is to be flooded with light and loss, and to find, ultimately, hard-won hope.
author of The River You Touch CHRIS DOMBROWSKI
This is a classic epic novel with 21st century humor and timeless spirituality. I laughed so much and cried just as often. It’s sexy, politically astute, visionary, and bold. I love this novel. I love David. Read it now.
author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time SHERMAN ALEXIE
Sun House is a book of healing that will earn a place on the shelf between the world’s ancient wisdom texts and Mark Twain...Here is a book like nothing I have ever read, an epic story about how we may be made whole in a broken time.
author of Earth's Wild Music KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE
Reading Sun House is like watching dawn in the high country. A clear, eastern light gains strength as the story unfolds, revealing a landscape as vast and gorgeous as any mountain range at daybreak. On this bright stage, David James Duncan’s unlikely, perfectly-wrought, beloved characters perform a miracle: From ragged strands of tragedy and epiphany, they weave the fabric of a more openhearted world.
author of Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the A BRYCE ANDREWS
An irreverent, offbeat and thoroughly likable tale.
