A Song from Faraway: A Novel

(Paperback)

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With his first book, the Commonwealth Prize-winning Vandal Love, Deni Ellis Bechard "reinvented the generational novel with innovative brilliance" (Robert Olen Butler). In his second novel, Into the Sun, he offered "a ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping portrait of the expatriate community in Kabul" (Phil Klay). Most recently, Foreword Reviews described his third novel, White, as "captivating, careening, thrilling, and magical." In this, his fourth work of fiction, Bechard takes readers from nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island to modern-day Iraq, tracing the story of a North American family that is at once singular and emblematic, and exploring the cultural repercussions of war and violence. Reinventing themselves in often unexpected ways, the characters in this tapestry defy simplification. A pair of half-brothers come together and drift apart, one passive and risk-averse, the other driven by a passionate desire to understand their reclusive father. A student of Mesopotamian archaeology encounters a young Iraqi man and soon finds himself in Kurdistan, researching stolen artifacts along with mysteries in his father's past. An Irish-Acadian soldier carries his fiddle and folk song across the battlefields of the First World War. An orphan-turned-assassin pursues his target across the deserts of Mexico and Texas, using a novel as evidence for his location. Growing together and then apart, these and others chase their dreams and run from their nightmares, hungry for life and longing for purpose. Animated throughout by a striking beauty and ferocity, A Song from Faraway pieces together "stories we tell about ourselves," illuminating the human condition and our times.

Reviews

"Bchard, also a journalist who has reported from all over the world, gifts us with an observant, lyrical, and powerful consideration of the violent expansiveness and dangerously flawed stories North American fathers have bequeathed to their sons. Tough of mind and tender of heart, its beauty is wholly entrancing." San Francisco Chronicle "A novel in stories, Bchard's fourth work of fiction follows one family from 19th-century Canada to modern Iraq, through war and spiritual yearning." New York Times Book Review, "New & Noteworthy" "Bchard (White) continues his interest in the relationship between myths and fiction writing in this complex, captivating tale . . . [He] provides rich insight into his characters' search for meaning through art." Publishers Weekly "Fundamentally, A Song from Faraway invites readers to participate in storytelling, to move through uncertainty toward clarity. When we hover between selves, when we lead double lives, when we ask impossible questions, 'We blend with others. We glimpse what else we might become.'" World Literature Today "A brilliant, gorgeous novel like nothing I've ever read before. With perfect sentences, Bchard writes about vulnerable lives, churning for recognition and purpose beneath the forces of history. The scope of this novel and the complexity of its characters is astounding. This book will make you rethink the incredible power of the stories we tell about ourselves and our inglorious past." Jen Percy, author of Demon Camp "Lavish and seductive, gloriously kaleidoscopic in conception, Deni Ellis Bchard's A Song from Faraway is a tremendous literary achievement and a page-turner. I fell under its spell completely." Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen A Song from Faraway brings us around the world, singing a song about the folly of truth. It is unsettling and playful and uncanny and breathtaking. Deni Ellis Bchard does in this work what a novel should do; he makes it new and spellbinds us with it.Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer Brave and complex, A Song from Faraway is prose of the highest order, offering a masterclass of characters that have nowhere to hide under the harsh light of their flawed lives. In this blanched terrain, Bchard proves himself to be a magician of a storyteller, deftly commanding the reader's attention with one hand while the other produces surprise after magnificent surprise.Dimitri Nasrallah Powerful, intimate, and compelling, Bchards novel will take your breath away. He shows us how fiction meets and transforms history to become fiction again, how what seems farawayour fathers battles, ancient art, the people we loveis nearby, and how mystery continues to propel both our histories and our private lives. Johanna Skibsrud Praise for White A compelling literary fantasia . . . Bchards fifth book blends fiction, literary and cultural criticism, parody and memoir. . . . It is as unsettling as it is thought-provoking.Minneapolis Star Tribune A tale that feel like James Michener and Gabriel Garcia Mrquez joined forces to craft a meditation on race. . . . In White, there is nothing clean cut about the way whiteness manifests in geopolitics. . . . Captivating, careening, thrilling, and magical, this is intelligent entertainment.Foreword Reviews (starred review) Whites self-aware, self-immolating interrogation of colonialism, whiteness, and fiction makes for a smart and dizzying feat of writing.Meridian Remarkable . . . White is a thriller, an adventure story, a literary novel that interrogates what the possession of whiteness means to those seen as white. His novel also crosses the boundary of the what defines a novel.Signature Praise for Into the Sun Into the Sun is a ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping portrait of the expatriate community in Kabulthe idealists, mercenaries, aid workers, and journalists circling around a war offering them promises of purpose, redemption, or cash, while the local Afghans in their orbit negotiate the ever-changing and ever-dangerous politics of the latter stages of the American war in Afghanistan. Brilliant.Phil Klay, National Book Awardwinning author of Redeployment Into the Sun is the sort of book Im always hungry forthe serious novel in which the guns literally go off. Bchard makes me think of Graham Greene and Robert Stone, which is heady company, indeed.Richard Ford Praise for Cures for Hunger You havent read a story like this one, even if your father was the kind of magnificent scoundrel you only find in Russian novels. Bchard is the rare writer who knows the secret to telling the true story. Just because the end is clear doesnt mean the bets are off.Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings Bchard writes that prison taught his father the nature of the self, the way it can be shaped and hardened. As in a great novel, this darkly comic and lyrical memoir demonstrates the shaping of its author, who suffers the wreckage of his fathers life, yet manages to salvage all the beauty of its desperate freedoms. Bchards poetic gifts give voice to the outsiders of society, and make them glow with humanity and love.Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen Praise for Vandal Love A strange and beautiful first novel . . . A sculpted artifact, built sentence by luminous, surprising sentence.Minneapolis Star Tribune A novel youll want to read slowly, savoring prose thats both lyrical and gritty, able to evoke big emotions with exquisite intimacy.O, The Oprah Magazine In Vandal Love Bechard has reinvented the generational novel with innovative brilliance. The book has all the quirky depth of a great HBO series and a line-to-line literary energy that is very rare. This is an enormously impressive debut by a clearly gifted writer.Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Author Bio

Deni Ellis Bchard is the author of seven previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Into the Sun, winner of the 2016 Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction and selected by CBC/Radio-Canada as one of the most important books to be read by Canadas political leadership. His work has received the Nautilus Book Award for Investigative Journalism and been featured in Best Canadian Essays, and his photojournalism has been exhibited in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. His articles, fiction, and photos have been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, Salon, Reuters, the Paris Review, The Guardian, Patagonia, La Repubblica, The Walrus, Pacific Standard, Le Devoir, Vanity Fair Italia, the Herald (Scotland), the Huffington Post, the Harvard Review, the National Post, and Foreign Policy. He has reported from India, Cuba, Rwanda, Colombia, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Afghanistan.