It’s 1972 and in a small town in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains, widowed Hannah and her son, Bo, mourn the loss of the family patriarch, Jozef Vinich and Bo’s brother, Sam, reported missing in action in Vietnam. Covering a period of a few months, we learn, mainly from the point of view of Bo, something of the tragic history of the family and the impact of his brother’s absence on the family and others. There is some gorgeous writing: "The air smelled of the same candle smoke and slight perfume of frankincense and gardenia that she remembered, and it still sounded even in its silence like every voice uttered was a whisper and that whisper would echo forever if she just sat and listened long enough." The book is incredibly sad in parts as tragedies - natural and manmade - come one after another; the toll of grief on some of the characters is sympathetically conveyed: “No, she had come to believe that the only thing one could be certain of was loss. The loss of others as one lived on. Loss as the last thing one left behind.” What prevents the book becoming too overwhelmingly depressing is the theme of reconciliation. There are some particularly moving and touching scenes between characters in which longstanding differences are set aside which, I’m not ashamed to say, moved me to tears. I loved the descriptions of the routine of daily domestic tasks which never become mundane but gave a sense of the rhythm of life in a small, isolated community. The author explores ideas of duty, obligation and continuity through Bo’s sense of connection to the land acquired by and handed down by his grandfather and there is a sense of a real regard for skill and craftmanship.
The one slight negative is that the absence of speech marks sometimes made it difficult to distinguish conversation between characters from internal monologue.