Magazine

This is a book about love, which makes it a book for all of us, because we all need instruction in that gentle art. It’s a book that builds empathy and reminds us that we rarely have any idea what sort of burden others are carrying.

Sun House reads like Duncan's other novels: sprawling, ambitious, imperfect, bursting with humor and sex and spiritual longing, drawing on ancient wisdom traditions of every kind and synthesizing them into nothing less audacious than a new nonreligion, which he calls Dumpster Catholicism.

Many folks have written recently about how divided America is, especially in the post-2016 moment, but few have done so as gracefully as Jeff Sharlet in his most recent book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.