David Allan Cates talks about and reads from his latest novel, Tom Connor's Gift, about which Bryan Di Salvatore writes, "Coursing between anecdote and musing, this is a novel only grownups can understand. It is smart and ecstatic and it will break your goddamn heart."
About the book:
A recently-widowed doctor, stunned by grief, retreats to a cabin on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front. Inside she has a puppy and a stack of letters from an old lover. Outside, there's a bear. As she revisits the letters from Tom Connor, we come to see, through his eyes, the dusty, broken alleys of Central America during the war years. The two narratives taken together explore themes of life-long love, about what we can see only when we are ready to see, and how hope can grow in the darkest of places. The third in what the author sees as his "homecoming trilogy" (after Hunger in American and Ben Armstrong's Strange Trip Home), Tom Connor's Gift shines a light on the transformative act of storytelling.
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About the author:
David Allan Cates is the author of four previous novels, most recently Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home, winner of a Gold Medal in the Independent Book Publishers Award. He’s published numerous short stories and poems, and his nonfiction has appeared in magazines such as Outside and The New York Times Sophisticated Traveler. He’s the executive director of Missoula Medical Aid.
