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Publisher Description
A dynamic, gripping collection of short stories from “America’s best novelist” (Denver Post), the New York Times bestselling James Lee Burke
Harbor Lights is a story collection from one of the most popular and widely acclaimed icons of American fiction, featuring a never-before-published novella. These eight stories move from the marshlands on the Gulf of Mexico to the sweeping plains of Colorado to prisons, saloons, and trailer parks across the South, weaving together love, friendship, violence, survival, and revenge.
As an atmosphere of suspicion pervades their Louisiana town, a boy and his father watch a German submarine sink an oil tanker. A girl is beaten up outside a bar as her university-professor father navigates new love and threats from a group of neo-Nazis. A pair of undercover union organizers are hired to break colts for a Hollywood actor, whose “Western hero” façade hides darkness. An oil rig worker witnesses a horrific attack on a local village while on a job in South America and seeks justice through one final act of bravery.
With his nuanced characters, complex prose, and ability to write shocking violence in the most evocative settings, James Lee Burke’s singular skills are on display in this superb anthology. Harbor Lights unfolds in stories that crackle and reverberate as unexpected heroes emerge.
8 Reviews
William Emory
Created 28 days ago
“These eight stories sings with lyrical, evocative and poetic prose, finely defined characters and believable dialogue. Burke is a master storyteller who reminds us of the damage evil people can do when power is misused. These are dark stories of hard times, mistakes and difficult choices made by tough people confronting an unyielding world. Burke refuses to sugar-coat the atrocities committed in the past. A couple of representative lines:
“People think the Dust Bowl ended with the 1930’s. It didn’t in Yoakum, Texas. I remember how cold and brittle and sharp the air was at eight in the morning six days after Pearl Harbor when my mother and I arrived at Grandfather’s paintless, pitiful home, in our old coupe with the hand-crank windshield, but I remember even more the way the dust was piled as smooth as cinnamon against the smokehouse and barn and windmill tank, and how the sun was a dull silver disk and the sky an ink wash and the pecan trees bare and black like they’d been scorched in a fire.”
“But I was too young to understand that when good people stray into dark waters, their lack of experience with human frailty can become a millstone around their necks.”Pam McGregor
Created 8 months agoDeeTeeDee
Created 8 months agoDonna
Created 8 months agoAbout James Lee Burke
James Lee Burke is a New York Times bestselling author, two-time winner of the Edgar Award, winner of the CWA Gold Dagger and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction. He has authored forty novels and two short story collections. He lives in Missoula, Montana.
Other books by James Lee Burke
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