The brilliant new novel from the author of The Work of Wolves
TWISTED TREE
A Novel
by Kent Meyers
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
www.hmhbooks.com
$24.00 Hardcover
ISBN 978-0-15-101389-0
Fiction set in a small community in South Dakota
Publication date September 24
“The novel is brimming with arresting descriptions, and the western setting is employed to surprising effect, as in a sequence contrasting the removal of an invasive salt cedar bush with a father’s awareness of his son’s first crush. Meyers’s small masterpiece deserves comparison to the work of Raymond Carver, Joy Williams and Peter Matthiessen.”
―Publisher’s Weekly, STARRED review“TWISTED TREE by Kent Meyers is one of those books that really grabs your attention in the first three pages and never lets go! It is actually the story of a human domino chain: the inter-related stories of what happens after one young girl in a very small town is killed. Meyers’s character development is superb….each character speaks by turns in the first person. Highly recommended.”
– Nancy Simpson, Book Vault, Oskaloosa, Iowa“TWISTED TREE makes me think of Winesburg, and the fine line between plain folks and grotesques–how one day, through the quirks of circumstance, we find ourselves on the other side of that line, and wonder how long we’ve been there. Like Russell Banks in The Sweet Hereafter, Kent Meyers spins out his intimate life stories from the hub of a small-town tragedy and takes us into places we never thought we’d go.”
―Stewart O’Nan, author of Songs for the Missing and Last Night at the Lobster
Read more from author Kent Meyers about how TWISTED TREE came to be written.
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TWISTED TREE is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, through Fujii Associates, or from your preferred wholesaler. Be sure to contact HMH or Fujii for more information about this title.
MBA BOOKSELLER INFORMATION
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Midwest Connections rebate form for TWISTED TREE (PDF)
If you would like to inquire about setting up bookstore or reading group events or phoners with author Kent Meyers, please contact Michelle Bonanno, Publicist, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 617.351.3832 phone, 617.351.1109 fax, michelle.bonanno@hmhpub.com.
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DOWNLOADS
- Full-color sign/flyer (PDF) — coming soon
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- Note from author Kent Meyers (PDF)
- Publisher press release (PDF)
- Publishers Weekly STARRED review (PDF)
- Book photo (JPG)
- Author photo (JPG)
- Midwest Connections rebate form for TWISTED TREE (PDF) — NEW!
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ABOUT THE BOOK
“In his beautiful and unsettling new novel, Meyers (The Work of Wolves) examines the effects of a murder on the residents of a small South Dakota town. In an opening sequence that is so disturbing it’s difficult to read, teen Hayley Jo Zimmerman is stalked and abducted by a serial killer. The rest of the novel uses the rippling consequences of Hayley Jo’s murder to explore the smaller rural tragedies in Twisted Tree, S.D.: Elise, a forlorn grocery clerk, judges everyone by their purchases and hides the secret terrors of her past as a missionary; Sophie Lawrence cares for her invalid stepfather while losing her sanity; Angela Morrison learns to accept the harsh realities of being a rancher’s wife; Stanley, Haley Jo’s father, channels his grief into a desperate need to connect with a stranger. The novel is brimming with arresting descriptions, and the western setting is employed to surprising effect, as in a sequence contrasting the removal of an invasive salt cedar bush with a father’s awareness of his son’s first crush. Meyers’s small masterpiece deserves comparison to the work of Raymond Carver, Joy Williams and Peter Matthiessen.”
―Publisher’s Weekly, STARRED review
Hayley Jo Zimmerman is gone. Taken. And the people of small-town Twisted Tree must come to terms with this terrible event—their loss, their place in it, and the secrets they all carry.
In this brilliantly written novel, one girl’s story unfolds through the stories of those who knew her. A supermarket clerk recalls an encounter with a disturbingly thin Hayley Jo. Sophie, Twisted Tree’s resident but secretly not-so-altruistic saint, is shaken by a single, passing moment during Hayley Jo’s adolescence. Dark memories paralyze Richard Mattingly as he as he struggles to help his son, Clay, cope with their new loss. An ex-priest remembers baptizing Hayley Jo and seeing her with her best friend, Laura, whose mother the priest once loved. And Laura berates herself for all the running they did, how it fed her friend’s withdrawal, and how there were so many secrets she didn’t see. And so, Hayley Jo’s absence recasts the lives of others and connects them, her death rooting itself into the community in astonishingly violent and tender ways.
TWISTED TREE is a tribute to the powerful effect one person’s life can have on everyone she knew. Solidly in the company of Aryn Kyle, Kent Haruf, and Peter Matthiessen, Kent Meyers is one of the best contemporary writers on the American West. Here he also takes us into the complexity of community regardless of landscape. Readers will be entranced by TWISTED TREE .
ABOUT THE AUTHORKent Meyers is the author of The Work of Wolves, Light in the Crossing, The River Warren, and Witness of Combines. He is a recipient of an ALA Alex Award, two Minnesota Book Awards, and a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Award. Meyers has been published in a wide array of prestigious magazines, including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Quarterly West, and Black Warrior Review. He lives in South Dakota.
