Twisted Tree - Paperback

by Kent Meyers (Author)

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. Among them, a supermarket clerk recalls an encounter with a disturbingly thin Hayley Jo. 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 addiction, 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.

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, and offers a tribute to the powerful effect one person's life can have on everyone she knew.

Front Jacket

"Meyers, like Faulkner and McCarthy, knows that the smallest corner of the country can contain the universe." --Marjorie Sandor, author of Night Gardner and Portrait of My Mother

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. Among them, a supermarket clerk recalls an encounter with a disturbingly thin Hayley Jo. 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 addiction, 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. And in Twisted Tree, acclaimed novelist Kent Meyers has created a powerful tribute to the effect one person's life can have on everyone she knew.

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Back Jacket

Praise for Twisted Tree

"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

"Twisted Tree is a piercing and original book, beautifully written and conceived. In it Kent Meyers has created a lyrical atlas, revealing all that lies beneath his indelible world of freeway towns and bison ranches--a haunted territory of regret, longing and guilt."

-- Jess Walter, author of Citizen Vince

"A master wordsmith and storyteller, Kent Meyers brings us characters who, like so many of us, take years, a lifetime even to face their histories, lying to each other and themselves along the way. I don't come across novels like this very often -- gorgeously written, addictively entertaining, suspenseful, and spirit-full." -- Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer

"In the riveting pages of Twisted Tree, Kent Meyers has expanded the map of his imaginative territory to produce his own brand of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County on the stark Midwestern plains. Present and past collide, exposing the delicate mix of history and dream that shapes the American landscape." -- Judith Kitchen, author of The House on Eccles Road

"Twisted Tree brings all of the dynamics of rural America to life with vivid prose and true to life characters. Kent Meyers is writing some of the most groundbreaking novels about the West today." --Russell Rowland, author of In Open Spaces

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