"A dazzling novel about love, loss, and the mysteries of the mind."
― David Ebershoff, Bestselling author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife
A family in crisis, a town torn apart, and the boy who holds the secret has been cocooned in a coma for ten years.
One warm, West Texas November night, a shy boy named Oliver Loving joins his classmates at Bliss County Day School’s annual dance, hoping for a glimpse of the object of his unrequited affections, an enigmatic Junior named Rebekkah Sterling. But as the music plays, a troubled young man sneaks in through the school’s back door. The dire choices this man makes that evening ―and the unspoken story he carries― will tear the town of Bliss, Texas apart.
Nearly ten years later, Oliver Loving still lies wordless and paralyzed at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, the fate of his mind unclear. Orbiting the stillpoint of Oliver’s hospital bed is a family transformed: Oliver’s mother, Eve, who keeps desperate vigil; Oliver’s brother, Charlie, who has fled for New York City only to discover he cannot escape the gravity of his shattered family; Oliver’s father, Jed, who tries to erase his memories with bourbon. And then there is Rebekkah Sterling, Oliver’s teenage love, who left Texas long ago and still refuses to speak about her own part in that tragic night. When a new medical test promises a key to unlock Oliver’s trapped mind, the town’s unanswered questions resurface with new urgency, as Oliver’s doctors and his family fight for a way for Oliver to finally communicate― and so also to tell the truth of what really happened that fateful night.
A moving meditation on the transformative power of grief and love, a slyly affectionate look at the idiosyncrasies of family, and an emotionally-charged page-turner, Stefan Merill Block's Oliver Loving is an extraordinarily original novel that ventures into the unknowable and returns with the most fundamental truths.
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"Stefan Block's profound third novel, Oliver Loving, is intricately constructed and rich with devastating, gorgeous prose. But it is the author's rare and special sense of empathy -- felt so deeply in every moment -- which elevates this novel to a breathtaking place."
- Jami Attenberg, New York Times bestselling author of The Middlesteins and All Grown Up
With exquisite prose and nuanced insights into the functions and dysfunctions of family, Oliver Loving ranges far and wide, from small-town Texas to New York City, communication with semi-living ghosts to the American appetite for violence, the uncharted territory of the human brain to the equally elusive mysteries of the human heart. Stefan Merrill Block has written a captivating, powerful novel."
― Teddy Wayne, author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine
"In lucid prose and with a tremendouslysure narrative hand, Block weaves together a coming of age story and a lamentof lost youth. This is the story of the devastation inflicted on those leftbehind by catastrophic illness, and the strength they find to live in the wakeof it. The novel becomes a thriller of sorts, with secrets upon secrets,conflicting agendas, and the truth quivering in every conversation. Anessential window into the consciousness of someone on the other side of animpenetrable veil, Oliver Loving brilliantly illuminates theenduring bonds of family and offers one of literature's best explorations ofthe limits of communication we all grapple with."
―MatthewThomas, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves
"One reason we read fiction is to know the lives of others as well as our own. In OLIVER LOVING Stefan Merrill Block writes about a West Texas family and community so wholly and honestly, and with such poetic beauty, that their dreams and sorrows become ours. This is a dazzling, psychologically astute, scientifically engaged novel about love, loss, and the mysteries of the mind. Through one family's tragedy Block dares to ask some of the most profound questions of what it means to be alive."
― David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife
"Stefan Merrill Block has a masterful understanding of family dynamics. He writes with authority about the power of secrets, shared history and how tragedy shapes lives. The result is a haunting, bittersweet, addictive novel that will keep you wondering until the very end."
―J Courtney Sullivan
"Like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, Oliver Loving is an extraordinary novel about family and community, told with real heart and humour and style. Stefan Merrill Block has the rare ability to capture, in his literature, the secrets we store in silence ― the pages of a life that are rarely read aloud."
― Jonathan Lee, author of High Dive
"Block has done an excellent job of building both his characters and the West Texas setting, which lives vividly on the page, all heat and dust and decrepitude. At once timely and timeless, this is an exciting story that rewards reader interest."
― Booklist, Starred Review
"The book poses big questions about what constitutes a life worth living."
― Publishers Weekly
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Book Description hardback. Condition: New. Language: ENG. Seller Inventory # 9781786492081
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. At once an affectionate, lyrical meditation on the transformative power of grief and a darkly comic Texan phantasmagoria of mangled lives and poisoned legacies, Oliver Loving ventures into the unthinkable and returns bearing no less than the truth of what ties a family together beyond love.One summer night, beneath the Perseid meteor shower, seventeen-year-old Oliver Loving's hand makes a first furtive journey across a Navajo picnic blanket towards his classmate Rebekkah Sterling's. A few months later, Hector Espina enters Bliss County Day School's gymnasium during homecoming and shoulders a hunting rifle. The thirty-five rounds he fires cut a leveling swathe through the past and future of Oliver, his family, and the entire population of Bliss, Texas.For the next nine years, Oliver is confined to a hospital bed. Conscious but totally paralyzed, he plumbs the depths of his own imagination, a twilit netherworld of myth, in search of meaning. Eve, his adoring and indomitable mother, holds a solemn, lonesome vigil. Vulnerable younger brother Charlie flees to New York where he desperately attempts to resurrect Oliver's consciousness using nothing but three weather-beaten journals full of unfinished poetry. Jed, Oliver's father, seems content to drink himself to death in a burnt out shack in the shadow of a resort hotel built on the land that is his birthright. But with the arrival of Professor McTeague from El Paso, towing along a new trailer-bound MRI machine and a revelation that Oliver's brain death may not be as complete as previously thought, a reckoning comes to Bliss and to the Loving family. Longtime grieving parent and newly minted experimental speech therapist Margot Strout descends, determined to make sure that Oliver reveals the truth about what happened that November night in this life or the next. What she finds, or claims to find, may prove the Lovings' salvation or push them forever into the outer darkness. 'Every page of thiscompelling,exquisitely writtennovelis suffused with a warm intelligence that evokes the best of Tobias Wolfe, Jeffrey Eugenides and Michael Chabon.With a superbevocation of place (Texas),Oliver Lovingis a haunting,imaginative, and deeply poignant storyby one of America's great wordsmiths.I love this wise, probing and beautiful novel.' - Steve Toltz Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781786492081
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Book Description Hardback. Condition: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. A school shooting in a Texan border town leaves a family in crisis, a community torn apart, and the boy who holds the secret cocooned in a coma for ten years. Seller Inventory # B9781786492081
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