Come Back

(Paperback)

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Description

Hal Wiens, a retired professor, is mourning the sudden death of his loving wife, Yo. One snowy April morning, while drinking coffee with his Den friend Owl in south-side Edmonton, he sees a tall man in an orange downfill jacket walk past on the sidewalk. The jacket, the posture, the head and hair are unmistakable: it's his beloved oldest son, Gabriel. But it can't be-Gabriel killed himself 25 years ago. The sighting throws Hal's inert life into tumult. Come Back is a rare and beautiful novel about the humanity of living and dying, a masterwork from a treasured writer.

Reviews

#1 BESTSELLER (McNally Robinson)
Finalist for the Alberta Readers Choice Awards
Winner of the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize
Winner of the Alberta Literary AwardsGeorges Bugnet Award for Fiction

"Powerful, at times lyrical, Come Back gives voice to the depth of familial love and the strength of the human desire for answers in the face of inconsolable loss."
Winnipeg Free Press

"Come Back lingers in the reader's mind and heart as a powerful and deeply felt spiritual biography."
Waterloo Regional Record

"A very real portrait of a grief-stricken father trying to piece together his son from unreliable scraps of information."
Edmonton Journal

"Come Back's tone is kind, and maintains an ethic of honesty. Even its starkest passages are underwritten with a kind of grave acceptance. . . . But Wiebe's principal achievement in Come Back is his avoidance of consolation. There is no cure for the pain of premature loss. Longing for the missing loved one will tug at the heart, call that command in perpetuity. Wiebe makes us attend to the beauty of the call."
The Globe and Mail

"Rudy Wiebes new novel, Come Back, succeeds in doing a rare thingarticulating grief in its full weight and depth while also buoying it with love. . . . [The narrative voice] feels, in fact, like a song, a hymn even, lyrical, gripping and heartbreakingthe kind of song that stops you on the spot and reaches into the chasm."
Alberta Views

"The writing [of Come Back] is elegiac in tone and the novel, as is to be expected from Wiebe, is stylistically experimental and challenging."
Quill & Quire

"[An] emotionally harrowing tale."
Toronto Star

"This novel is for anyone who contemplates not only how terrible things happen in this world, but why love cannot always save people. . . .Wiebe has used the eloquence of words as a response to unanswered questions of loss and tragedy."
Mennonite Life

Author Bio

RUDY WIEBE's novels, stories and essays stand at the forefront of Canadian literature. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction twice, for The Temptations of Big Bear and for A Discovery of Strangers. He is also the co-author of Stolen Life, which won the Viacom Canada Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Alberta Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. His memoir, Of This Earth, won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and was a national bestseller.