![]() Harris is a writer of great lyricism and power – he can lend even laundry emotional significance: “A bleary glance out the window revealed his mother dipping his pants into the boiling water of the copper washing kettle… He thought he would have to go pant-less about his home, until he remembered the drawer full of clothes across the room, a bounty to a man who had held on so dearly, to so little, for so long. As an author, Harris eventually exercises a kind of fiery Old Testament justice, which is at once satisfying and terrifying. When author Nathan Harris was younger, a teacher gave him a piece of advice that profoundly affected the now-29-year-old scribe: Imagine there's a cafeteria table filled with the writers who came before you, the ones you admire that made you pick up a pen in the first place. Of Mice and Men seems to be an obvious model for the dynamic between the brothers: Landry was beaten so badly and frequently while enslaved that he has stopped speaking, but looms over Prentiss, his quick-witted brother. At mealtimes, Isabelle observes that her dinner table hosts “an assortment of damaged bodies collected together to gain sustenance”. I picked up this recent first novel by Nathan Harris, which became an immediate bestseller and an award-winner last year, based on rave reviews from my wife and several friends in her book club who had already read it. The friendship between Walker and the two freed men nonetheless helps him live again as he and his stoic wife Isabelle grieve the loss of their only son in the war. Book Review: The Sweetness of Water (2021). Elif Shafak on The Island of Missing Trees: ‘If I worry about how my books will be received, I can’t write’ ![]()
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