Plainsong: Picador Classic

I suppose it is crazy. I don't know. I don't even care. But that girl needs somebody . . . And you old solitary bastards need somebody too. Somebody or something besides an old red cow to care about and worry over.

Set in Kent Haruf's fictional landscape of Holt County, Colorado, Plainsong is a story of simple lives told with extraordinary empathy. Tom Guthrie is struggling to bring up his two young sons alone, and in the same town, school girl Victoria Roubideaux is pregnant and homeless. Whilst Tom's boys find their way forward without their mother, brothers Harold and Raymond McPheron - gentle, solitary, gruff and unpolished - agree to take Victoria in, unaware that their lives will change for ever.

A novel of haunting beauty from one of America's greatest writers of our time, Plainsong explores the grace and hope of every human life and mankind's infinity capacity for love.

'Beautifully crafted, alive and quietly magnificent. I read it in one mesmerising sitting. I had no choice; it would not let me go' Roddy Doyle

'So delicate and lovely that it has the power to exalt the reader' New York Times