Our Souls at Night
by Kent Haruf
2015 / 188 pages
rating –  8.5 /  contemp lit (US)

Kent Haruf has done it again – a gentle story about life in a small town in Wyoming – the same place Plainsong and his other novels are set.  But each of these  novels is a stand-alones,  no need to read a prior before this one.

One day the 70-year old Addie Moore walks down the street to visit her long-time neighbor, Louis Waters.  They are both widowed and alone so she asks him if he’d like to spend the night – just to lie next to each other and talk.  He agrees and that night he arrives and the arrangement works for them,  it sticks.   The book and their relationship is not about sex,  it’s about loneliness and companionability and a couple of the common ways in which the world can interfere.  It’s also about the general heartaches of life as they reveal their histories to their bed-partner.  >>>>MORE>>>>