The Road Home

Boston Sunday Herald

The Road Home is Harrison at the peak of his powers, a splendid combined prequel and sequel...very much alive and probably his best novel.

Newsweek

Each Northridge family member stitches in a piece of the family history. They are such good company you forget they exist nowhere but in Harrison's imagination.

San Diego Star-Tribune

Harrison gives us characters with heart and soul; keen-eyed and rarely sentimental, they are the sorts of people we'd like to be.".

The New York Times Book Review

A graceful novel...To read this book is to feel the luminosity of nature in one's own being.

The Washington Post

Demonstrates why [Harrison] is considered one of the best storytellers around.

The Washington Times

Rich in character, complex in theme, dazzling in scope....The cumulative effect is overwhelming.

Corey Mesler

A bountiful, rambunctious, serious book about who we are and how we become that way. . .its muscular, life-affirming story may open a few eyes and hearts.
—Memphis Commercial Appeal

Dan Cryer

A fascinating family album. . .astonishingly rich and vivid and, ultimately, quite moving. . .The Road Home is a rapturous but unsentimental hymn of praise for the wondrous strangeness of life. —Newsday

John Flesher

[The Road Home] is a wondrous tale, larded with earthy humor and crafted with the painstaking attention to detail that is a Harrison hallmark. . . this is a masterful novel, one that compels the reader to care deeply about its fascinating cast of characters and treasure, with them, the beauty of nature and a life freely lived. -- ForeWord Magazine

Steve Dykes

Harrison at the peak of his powers. . .an epic narrative that expands in richness of human association as it follows each character's strife-filled story, reinforcing and validating an ultimately harmonious vision of life.
—Boston Sunday Herald

Sunday Times(London)

Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him.

The Boston Globe

Set in the heart of America, his stories move with random power and reach, in the manner of Melville and Faulkner.

The New Yorker

Harrison stands high among the writers of his generation.

Thomas McNamee

There is comfort in knowing, on the first page of a novel, that you are in the hands of a master. . . .To read this book is to feel the luminosity of nature in one's own being. — The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A decade after the stunning Dalva, Harrison returns to the Northridge family of Nebraska in a saga that spans three generations of stoic loss, intermittent happiness and a healing proximity to the natural world. Tough old patriarch John Northridge narrates the first and strongest section, an apologia for the life he has led, first as a youth between two cultures (he is the son of a white father and a Lakota Sioux mother), then as a sensitive art student and, for most of his life, as a formidable rancher and cattle farmer, husband, father and grandfather. Northridge's life has paralleled the development of the Great Plains, and his intimate connection with the land humanizes his often cruel behavior to his wife, who left him, and his surviving son, Paul (his favorite son, Dalva's father, was killed in the Korean war). Other narrators are nomadic Nelse, the son Dalva gave up for adoption when she was 15, who finds her when he is 30; Naomi, Dalva's mother; Paul; and the still headstrong Dalva herself. As one expects of Harrison, the characters all share an instinctive love for the their native landscape and for the horses, dogs and birds that evoke their most treasured memories. With an unforced lucidity, the novel explores the tension between the Native American and white cultures, the effects of art and poetry on one's conception of existence and the very purpose of existence viewed from 'the grace of the divinely ordinary' life. Two miscalculations flaw the novel. One is the sameness of the narrative voice, with all the characters, male and female, speaking in the same indistinguishable Midwestern cadences. The other is that, in attempting to reflect the quality of Nebraskan life, Harrison lets his characters describe their mundane experiences in meticulous but often pedestrian detail. While he thus stitches a fabric of impressive strength and depth, the narrative sometimes becomes tedious. Yet readers who let themselves be captured by the novel's breadth -- from the late 1800s to 1987-- and the memorable depictions of stalwart people striving to understand their destinies, will be rewarded by a deep and nourishing story.

Library Journal

In this sequel to cult favorite Dalva, his first full-length novel in 10 years, Harrison continues the story of his intrepid heroine, her half-Sioux grandfather, the son taken from her at birth, and more.

Library Journal

In this sequel to cult favorite Dalva, his first full-length novel in 10 years, Harrison continues the story of his intrepid heroine, her half-Sioux grandfather, the son taken from her at birth, and more.

Corey Mesler

A bountiful, rambunctious, serious book about who we are and how we become that way. . .its muscular, life-affirming story may open a few eyes and hearts. -- The Memphis Commercial Appeal

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

Jim Harrison ought to be considered a national treasure. . . .The Road Home is his longest, most ambitious and satisfying novel to date: rich in character, complex in theme, dazzling in scope. -- The Washington Times

Malcolm Jones, Jr.

A sage as homespun as an old quilt. . .[The characters] are such good company you forget they exist nowhere but in Harrison's imagination. -- Newsweek

Robert F. Gish

Good fiction, like Jim Harrison's latest novel, The Road Home, reaffirms that our separate and private lives reflect patterns of a larger humanity. . . .Harrison dramatizes with sage sensibility the lesson that no one is an island apart from the rest of us. . .The Road Home is a fine novel, crafted with great passion, gusto, and empathy. Read for its wisdom and its application to all our lives. . .Harrison's art and rage for order bring the strong and abiding truths of fiction to our search for family values, for old verities. -- The Christian Science Montior

Steve Dykes

Harrison at the peak of his powers. . .an epic narrative that expands in richness of human association as it follows each character's strife-filled story, reinforcing and validating an ultimately harmonious vision of life. -- Boston Sunday Herald

Thomas McNamee

There is comfort in knowing, on the first page of a novel, that you are in the hands of a master. . . .To read this book is to feel the luminosity of nature in one's own being. -- The New York Times Book Review

Tim Wendel

In his new novel, The Road Home, Jim Harrison demonstrates why he is considred one of the best storytellers around. . . .Harrison is at the top of his game. -- USA Today

Tom BeVire

An epic of Faulknerian proportions leavened with a good measure of Native American and Zen spirituality. -- Detroit Free Press

William Porter

The Road Home confirms what his longtime fans already know: Harrison is on the short list of American literary masters. -- The Denver Post

Kirkus Reviews

There is in all of Harrison's (Julip) work an almost pagan celebration of lives spent close to the land, and of the necessary round of life and death. That awareness, and acceptance, are at the heart of this portrait of three generations of a Nebraska family. The patriarch, John Northridge, is the son of a Native American woman and a white man, and much of his life has been shaped by the struggle to come to grips with his fragmented heritage. As a young man, he entertains the idea of becoming a painter, and in doing so escaping from the conflicted loyalties of his childhood. Instead, he becomes a successful, if somewhat ruthless, rancher. The novel consists of a series of first-person narratives, beginning with John's retrospective memoir of his life, a particularly effective section in its mix of harsh honesty and in its lack of brooding guilt. By contrast, the other family members who narrate are all shadowed by it. Paul, John's son, has been haunted by the fact that he's survived to inherit the Northridge ranch while his brother, John's favorite, died in a hero in Korea. He left behind a child, Dalva, now a bright, loving, rebellious young woman. She in turn has been scarred ever since, at the age of 15, she gave birth to a son who was immediately given up for adoption. Her son, Nelse, 30, has set out to find his birth mother, and their excited discovery of each other is explored at some length. Dalva is now dying, and the last and most powerful section follows her final days as she struggles stoically to come to terms with her life and to choose the way in which she leaves it. A vivid meditation on the defining power of the family, and of the kind of redemption offered by anawareness of nature's rather pitiless beauty.