Name: Very Old Bones
Price: 23.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: William Kennedy
ISBN: 9780140138986

Riding on the melody of its language and the power of its story, Very Old Bones is a climatic work in the Albany Cycle from the Pultizer Prize-winning author of Ironweed

It is 1958 and the Phelan clan has gathered to hear Peter Phelan’s will. Peter was an artist whose paintings about members of the family have given him belated critical recognition. The paintings illuminate the lives of his brother Francis (the exiled hero of Ironweed), and a family ancestor, Malachi McIlhenny, a true madman beset by demons, and determined to send them back to hell.

Orson Purcell, bastard son of Peter, encounters his first true solace through this obsessive and close-knit family he has never quite entered. It is through Orson’s modern eye that we see the tragedies, obsessions, and clandestine joys of the singular Phelan family.

William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.

Praise for Very Old Bones

“An immensely gratifying novel…With its dialogue as chillingly perceptive as its family insights, this novel has about it a crisp, authoritative ease-as though the truth were just hiding there on the outskirts of Albany, waiting to be brought home, and Kennedy obliged.”—The Boston Globe

“Kennedy’s justly acclaimed Albany Cycle [is] one of the imperishable products of American literature since the Second World War. These books can be read singly or in sequence, but read they must be. Kennedy is one of our necessary writers.”—GQ

“Kennedy succeeds admirably in shuttling his narrative voice between present and past and weaving a cloth in which history and myth are indistinguishable….Few Irish-American writers have produced more haunting portraits of their ancestors or the ghosts that possessed them than Kennedy has in Very Old Bones.”—The New York Times

“Kennedy’s novels have the rough feel of stories told, not of chapters written and artfully polished. His beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table late at night, whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny, tangles of old resentments and fresh exasperations.”—TIME

“Very Old Bones deals with the artistic process, with the difficulties of romantic love, with the astonishing twists and turns that an individual life can take, but its most important truths concern the ways that our individual destinies are linked to our ancestral past.”—USA Today

“This is a novel of brilliant speeches and innovative, ambitious plotting….Above all, this is the sound and sense of a fiction writer very much working with a poet’s ear and heart. Kennedy’s prose is swift and glib, intent upon creating sparks and surprises, and fully open to life’s magical touches, its haunts and ghostly discoveries.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“With remarkable tenderness, yet without a hint of sentimentality, both [Very Old Bones and Ironweed] delineate family and community ties, portray the spiritually needy, and evoke the grimmest and grubbiest of lives while convincingly suggesting the possibility of redemption.”—The Washington Post

Very Old Bones

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