On my mental bookshelf, Robert Lukins’s debut novella, 2018’s The Everlasting Sunday, sits alongside volumes like Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade: novels of lavish melancholy and human grace. Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog is on that shelf, as is John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, and an obligatory copy of John Williams’s Stoner. Quiet classics.
When The Everlasting Sunday arrived – a tale of outcast boys and a formative 1960s winter – it felt like the book had slipped through some fissure in the space-time continuum, less a new release than a rediscovery. Lukins’s new novel, Loveland, tears the fabric of time open for itself: the past reaches forward; the present reaches back. Reckonings collide.
