Prudence: A Novel; Library Edition

David Treuer's novel Prudence is a wondrous and mesmerizing narrative-intricate, seductive, and wholly gratifying.

A beautiful, somber, unlikely love story, as pure as the Minnesota landscape against which it is tragically played out.

Prudence is an excellent, page-turning mystery and at the same time delves deeply into characters whose lives are rarely portrayed in our literature. David Treuer is a truly original and necessary voice in American fiction.

The poetics of damage permeates David Treuer's elegantly bitter fourth novel, Prudence, which unites a distinctly modern sociopolitical perspective with a more old-fashioned moral rigor about the consequences of emotional cowardice, complicity, and repression...Treuer is particularly skilled in showing how a substantial lie in one area of a life can manifest as a distortion in another, apparently unrelated area...Without judgment, but also without blinking, he expertly vivisects characters who can't own up to the truth about themselves, showing how the unaddressed damage only deepens over time...Prudence hurts, and that hurt lingers. Very few novels take that much of a risk.

This book is so good that when you get to the end, you'll want to reread the beginning to see how the author set his magic in motion...This gorgeously restrained novel has much to say about race, class, gender, sexuality, love, and war through the stories of men and women whose fates become urgently important to us.

Treuer writes beautifully about the dark corners of human nature, and the brief reprieves that come in even the most unhappy lives.

His World War II-era novel speaks to the present moment in American history with more eloquence and complexity than the nightly newscast...[A] tender and devastating book...[and a] master class on suspense, shifting perspective, and conflicting desire.

A tightly plotted hybrid fiction that combines elements of a mystery, a literary romance, and a Greek tragedy.

Clearness and precision are what Ojibwa writer Treuer so evocatively attains in this magnetizing and richly original novel. As he cycles in and out of his extraordinarily affecting characters' lives of deprivation and stoicism, he elucidates stygian emotions and annihilating psychological traumas incited by brutal, even genocidal conflicts over sexuality, race, and religion. Treuer's trenchant and compassionate novel glimmers with nature's potent beauty, fresh historical detail, and scrupulous insight.

Treuer adds depth to each of the characters' stories by revealing tidbits of backstory, but it's the saga of Frankie and Billy's thwarted love and the consequences of their actions that feels the most devastating and resonant, haunting both men as they're shipped off to war. Perhaps most fitting is the book's title-which speaks volumes about each character's integrity, culpability, and resilience in the face of a collective tragedy.