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"Joshua Harmon has written a
wonderful first novel, austere and beautiful, daringly original,
and deeply mysterious, like history itself." Quinnehtukqut evokes the impressionistic sweep and lyrical beauty of The English Patient alongside the brilliant idiosyncratic vitality of Mason and Dixon. But Joshua Harmon is a thoroughly original writer, who is doing no less than reinventing storytelling before our eyes, by means of a dazzling, ever-shifting formal innovation, the primary allegiance of which is always to music. Quinnehtukqut is mesmerizing line by line." - Mary Caponegro "Through a series of loosely
linked fictions that toy with both the mythologizing and the dislocating
effects of language, Quinnehtukqut provides a mesmerizing
picture of a place over time. Teasing a complex and compelling narrative
out of a vast array of voices, documentation, and styles, this is
historical fiction at its most eccentric and best." "Joshua Harmon's magical postmodern epic ranges across time, threading fragments of oral history, diaries, and news accounts into parallel tales of mystery, wonder, and tragedy. Quinnehtukqut calls to mind the perceptive historical accuracy of W.G. Sebald and the experimental bravura of Sorrentino or Sukenick, but Joshua Harmon has fashioned a novel completely his own." - Jayne Anne Phillips "What survives and what is lost - frontiers, houses, towns, loves, parents, stories - is at the core of Harmon's stunning adventure in narrative, Quinnehtukqut. Sentence by sentence, fragment by fragment, couplet by couplet he 'pushes back the darkness' creating 'a gorgeous signal along the horizon.'" - Victoria Redel ISBN 0-9788811-2-5 ISBN-13 978-0-9788811-2-2 |
Set
in a region of northern New Hampshire that for several years in
the 1830s declared itself an independent nation, Joshua Harmon's
debut novel traces the real and imagined travels of Martha Hennessy,
a girl wishing for a life beyond her family's farm. In language
as varied and musical as the Connecticut River the title invokes,
Quinnehtukqut interweaves Martha's story with those of
the dreamers and drifters whose lives intersect hers: an American
soldier scarred by the first World War, a mythical and murderous
tramp seeking lost Indian gold, a man haunted by his memories
of Byrd's expeditions to Antarctica, an industrialist longing
to become a woodsman, and an old woman forced to leave her home
due to the planned flooding of a valley. Elegiac and lyrical,
evocative and visionary, Quinnehtukqut reveals how people
inhabit place and how place inhabits people through its vivid
study of the New England landscape.
