Haven's Wake
Early July, and the corn in eastern Nebraska stands ten feet tall; after a near-decade of drought, it seems too good to be true, and everyone is watching the sky for trouble. For the Grebels, whose plots of organic crops trace a modest patchwork among the vast fields of soybeans and corn, trouble arrives from a different quarter in the form of Elsa's voice on her estranged son's answering machine: "Your father's dead. You'll probably want to come home."
When a tractor accident fells the patriarch of this Mennonite family, the threads holding them together are suddenly drawn taut, singing with the tensions of a lifetime's worth of love and faith, betrayal and shame. Through the competing voices of those gathered for Haven Grebel's funeral, acts of loyalty and failures, long-suppressed resentments and a tragic secret are brought to light, expressing a larger, complex truth.
Ladette Randolph is the editor-in-chief of Ploughshares magazine and is Distinguished Publisher-in-Residence at Emerson College. She is the award-winning author of A Sandhills Ballad (Nebraska, 2011), This Is Not the Tropics, and Leaving the Pink House, and editor of two anthologies, including A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation grant, four Nebraska Book Awards, and the Virginia Faulkner Award.
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"Haven's Wake is about memory and silence, and about secrets and the fear of them. But above all, it's a tale of love and loyalty. At the very heart of this deeply heartfelt novel is the story of the restorative power of family and tradition."--Timothy Schaffert, author of The Coffins of Little Hope -- (09/19/2012)
"Ladette Randolph traces that finest of lines between what counts as betrayal and what counts as fidelity in a family, what counts as love and what counts as duty over the generations, what counts as desire and what counts as necessity in a home. Haven's Wake is a moving reckoning of disappointments and glories."--William Lychack, author of The Architect of Flowers -- (09/19/2012)
"A song of a story--uplifting, tender, heart-shattering. Ladette Randolph is a master. These characters are so real to me I feel I could drive to Nebraska and find them, easily."--Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red -- (09/19/2012)
"[Haven's Wake is] lyrically written and a wonderful read."--Ellen Meeropol, ellenmeeropol.com -- (01/03/2013)
"Randolph is an excellent writer, telling the story with a frankness and humor that keeps it from sinking into melodrama."--Publishers Weekly
--Publishers Weekly (04/01/2013)
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