Laura Hardback - 2000

"A writer whose work is worthy of prizes" "(Los Angeles Times Book Review)," Larry Watson's intricate human landscapes and virtuosic ruminations on the American West have made him one of today's most acclaimed authors of contemporary fiction. Now, in a captivating departure, he unveils a portrait of faith, obsession, and enduring love -- and a work of greater tenderness than anything he has yet written.

"Laura"

"In the summer of 1955 I met Laura Coe Pettit, and the moment of that meeting was the one from which I began a measurement of time. Clocks and calendars can try to convince us that time always passes in equal measure, but we know better. Our thirty-fifth summer passes five times faster than our seventh, and for years my life speeded up or slowed down according to my meetings with or departures from Laura."

Love captures Paul Finley in, of all places, his own bedroom -- literally waking him from his dreams. The night he discovers Laura Pettit standing at his windowsill, Paul is eleven years old, a boy naturally inclined toward seriousness, precociously adept at the art of watching the world without being watched. Laura is twenty-two, a fiercely passionate and independent poet already experiencing the first flickers of fame, a beautiful woman on the brink of seducing Paul's father. No matter; Paul is smitten. When she leaves him to rejoin the grown-ups' party downstairs, Laura issues Paul a wholly impossible command, one that will haunt and consume both of them for the rest of their lives: "Forget me."

Laying bare the inner life of one man during the course of nearly four decades, Larry Watson delivers a riveting treatise on the excruciating power oflove -- and two of the most remarkable characters in recent American literature. Infused with breathtaking pathos and delicate grace, "Laura" is an extraordinary triumph of the novelist's art.