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Hayley Jo Zimmerman is gone. Taken. And the people of small-town Twisted Tree must come to terms with this terrible event-their loss, their place in it, and the secrets they all carry. In this brilliantly written novel, one girl's story unfolds through the stories of those who knew her. Among them, a supermarket clerk recalls an encounter with a disturbingly thin Hayley Jo. An ex-priest remembers baptizing Hayley Jo and seeing her with her best friend, Laura, whose mother the priest once loved. And Laura berates herself for all the running they did, how it fed her friend's addiction, and how there were so many secrets she didn't see. And so, Hayley Jo's absence recasts the lives of others and connects them, her death rooting itself into the community in astonishingly violent and tender ways. Solidly in the company of Aryn Kyle, Kent Haruf, and Peter Matthiessen, Kent Meyers is one of the best contemporary writers on the American West. Here he also takes us into the complexity of community regardless of landscape, and offers a tribute to the powerful effect one person's life can have on everyone she knew.
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Reviews
"Twisted Tree is a piercing and original book, beautifully written and conceived. In it Kent Meyers has created a lyrical atlas, revealing all that lies beneath his indelible world of freeway towns and bison ranches--a haunted territory of regret, longing and guilt."
Jess Walter, author of Citizen Vince and Over Tumbled Graves
"Twisted Tree makes me think of Winesburg, and the fine line between plain folks and grotesques-how one day, through the quirks of circumstance, we find ourselves on the other side of that line, and wonder how long we've been there. Like Russell Banks in The Sweet Hereafter, Kent Meyers spins out his intimate life stories from the hub of a small-town tragedy and takes us into places we never thoug
Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing and Last Night at the Lobster
"It's hard to find Chinese spices in Twisted Tree, South Dakota, but you'll find just about everything else in Kent Meyers' evocation of the American West, including a world of fascinating characters all tugged toward their central star, the lost girl Hayley Jo Zimmermann. Meyers, like Faulkner and McCarthy, knows that the smallest corner of the country can contain the universe. This is a brillian
Marjorie Sandor, author of Night Gardner and Portrait of My Mother