johndaviesburt.com

The kindle version of A Moment’s Surrender has just come out today on Amazon. It looks fine on my tablet, on my laptop, and on my phone, but I haven’t checked it on an actual Kindle.

Here is a new review from Indiereader on Amazon:

When the stabbed body of celebrated poet Tom Corbin turns up south of Lone Pine on Route 395, his former best friend Paul Bishop, an adjunct writing instructor stranded in Reno, finds himself the keeper of a secret that will bind him to Corbin’s terminally ill widow Susan and send him spiraling back toward Rachel Lake, the woman both men loved and betrayed in graduate school.

John Burt’s debut is a literary novel of unusual density and patience, set precisely in the spring of 1980 and steeped in the period’s poetry wars, liberation theology, and Cold War campus politics. Bishop reads like a beautifully realized study in self-negation: a man so fluent in his own limitations that each failure feels both inevitable and newly earned. While framed within a murder mystery, the novel’s great strength is the quality of its thinking – about poetry, about jealousy, about the difference between honesty and courage. Those expecting thriller mechanics will be disappointed. “A Moment’s Surrender” is closer to Henry James than James Ellroy. The prose is meticulous, sometimes to the point of austerity, but the emotional architecture is solid. A deliberately slow burn that will reward readers willing to match its pace.