Book Description
A selection of Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program—Now in a new edition from Harcourt
Winner of ForeWord Magazine‘s Book of the Year Award, receiving the Gold Seal in Literary Fiction.
Told with the compression and force of a poem, The Vanishing Moon is a novel of desire, unyielding necessity, and the people and places that inevitably disappear from our lives. Opening against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Coulson leads us on a heart-wrenching journey across two generations of an extraordinary midwestern family. This debut novel offers us a chorus of candid and poignant voices reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson and Carson McCullers.
The Vanishing Moon is the lyrical account of the Tollman family’s demise, but it is so beautifully crafted that one keeps turning the pages rapidly; that is, when one isn’t stopping to ponder its poignantly poetic phrases and sentences depicting the scenery and dynamic characters.
— The Historical Novels Review
Coulson balances the heartbreak of reality with scenes of unearthly beauty, the tenderness and passion of first love and the impulsive yearning of young men for a world that has a place for them. The fully-fleshed characters serve to remind us that the stories of our ancestors may be obscured by time, but are no less relevant today.
— curledup.com
The Vanishing Moon … explores human frailty with the simplicity and directness of haiku...at times achieves the quiet beauty of William Maxwell's finest work—generous, episodic, elegiac but not sentimental...Coulson seems to want to bring Faulkner to Ohio.
— The Nation
