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"The book rises or falls on the strength of Howard Elman, and this man could hold up a house. By turns tormented, funny, poignant and appalling, he lodges in the memory – and successfully launches the career of Ernest Hebert." —New York Times Book Review
The first novel in Hebert's acclaimed Darby series.
"His life had come to this: save a few deer from the jaws of dogs. He was a small man sent to perform a small task."
Howard Elman is a man whose internal landscape is as disordered as his front yard, where native New Hampshire birches mingle with a bullet-riddled washer, abandoned bathroom fixtures, and several junk cars. Howard, anti-hero of this first novel in Ernest Hebert's highly acclaimed Darby series, is a mixture too.
Howard's battle against encroaching change symbolizes the class conflict between indigenous Granite Staters scratching out a living and citified immigrants with "college degrees and big bank accounts." Like the winter-weakened deer threatened by the dogs of March -- the normally docile house pets whose instincts arouse them to chase and kill for sport -- Howard, too, is sorely beset.
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ERNEST HEBERT lives in New Hampshire and teaches writing at Dartmouth College. The final volume in his acclaimed "Darby" cycle, Live Free or Die, has also been reissued as a Hardscrabble book. UPNE has published his latest novel, the critically-acclaimed The Old American, as well as his novel Mad Boys and has also reissued under the title The Kinship two other books from the Darby series: A Little More Than Kin and The Passion of Estelle Jordan.
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To learn more about Ernest Hebert and his writing visit his website here.
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