STRANGE BIRDS IN THE TREE OF HEAVEN
A Novel
Karen Salyer McElmurray | Author
$25NOW $4.95 hardcover
- 320 pages | hardcover
- 1-892514-24-9
- Fiction
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A gut-wrenching debut novel about desire: desire for God, desire for love, desire for the past, and desire for redemption. Ultimately, the choice is life or death.
“A strongly imagined and skillfully executed debut performance.”—Kirkus Reviews
the book
re-demp-tion: 1. to free from what distresses or harms / 2. to release from blame / 3. to free from the consequences of sin / 4. to make worthwhile
Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven is a book about desire: desire for God, desire for love, desire for the past, and desire for redemption. Ultimately, the choice is life or death.
In Karen Salyer McElmurray's brilliant debut novel, set in Mining Hollow in eastern Kentucky, we meet Ruth Blue Wallen; her husband, Earl Wallen; and their son, Andrew. Ruth longs to know God, the only escape she knows in a world that has shown her spiritual, emotional, and sensual defeat. Earl Wallen yearns for the music-making of his past, now forgone in order to make a living as a coal miner. Andrew wants the love of his boyhood friend, and their mutual passion is ultimately fulfilled, an expression of love considered sinful in eastern Kentucky. And, with the divinely inspired yet tormenting help of his mother, in a world of deeply and tragically conflicting desires, Andrew must choose to live or die—he must choose an uncertain love or nothing at all.
the author
Karen McElmurray lives in Lynchburg, VA, and is assistant professor of creative writing at Lynchburg College. She has received dozens of writing fellowships, grants, and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Award, and the James Purdy Prize for Fiction, as well as acknowledgment from the Associated Writing Programs. She has published essays and stories in numerous magazines and journals. This is her first novel.
the praise
"McElmurray has a singular gift—she takes the black and white hardscrabble world of eastern Kentucky and transmutes it into something shimmering and beautiful through the prism of magic realism, telling the truth and more than the truth. Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven is a work of stunning originality."—Lee Smith
"A powerful, memorable, and surprising love story. Vivid and sensuous and deeply moving. Not since the late William Goyer has any novelist that I know of made such wonderful, haunting music out of our speech and our deepest hopes and dreams."—George Garrett
"A strongly imagined and skillfully executed debut performance. Intense characterizations and strikingly apt imagery distinguish this lushly rhetorical first novel."—Kirkus Reviews
"McElmurray vividly captures harsh realities [and] succeeds in conveying the enormity of choices made in a world governed by fervent beliefs."—Publishers Weekly