by Anne Valente
Rhiannon takes the pen. Marks her initials. Squints across the sand and salt of the Jetty. Lets herself stand beside Billie in the silent blue.
Mother, we were here.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Kerry D’Agostino, for your unwavering support of this book and of my work, and for believing always in the journey of this novel. Thank you to Margaux Weisman for acquiring this book. Thank you, Jessica Williams, for giving it a home, for such a thorough and razor-sharp editorial hand, and for teaching me the skills of compression, brevity, and letting the words gleam. Thank you to the entire team at William Morrow, including Julia Elliott for her assistance with this novel and Laurie McGee for careful copyedits. I am boundlessly grateful for such a dream team.
Thank you to the Santa Fe Public Library for providing me with manuals, textbooks, and even children’s books on falconry and NASCAR racing, including Jeff MacGregor’s Sunday Money: Speed! Lust! Madness! Death! A Hot Lap Around America with Nascar, James McKay’s Practical Falconry, and Corona Brezina’s Falconry and Game Hawking.
Thank you to Terry Tempest Williams and Robin Wall Kimmerer, two guiding lights leading the way of this book.
Thank you to the city of Santa Fe, and to the immeasurable inspiration of my students and colleagues at Santa Fe University of Art and Design as I wrote this novel. You taught me a lifetime in two years. Thank you to Moab and Salt Lake City, and to the bright blue solitude of the Spiral Jetty. Thank you, infinitely, to my colleagues and students at Hamilton College.
Thank you, always, to my family. Mom and Dad, you are the very best, as is your love of records and the University of Illinois. Michelle, though these siblings aren’t us, thank you for teaching me what love between sisters means. All my love to Jeff, Noa, and Salem.
Thank you to Josh Finnell, first reader and bedrock, who has driven this entire country beside me and who was there beneath all that desert light.
About the Author
ANNE VALENTE is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down. Her short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Believer, Catapult, Rumpus, and the Washington Post, among other publications. Originally from St. Louis, she currently lives in upstate New York and teaches at Hamilton College.
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Praise for Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
“Anne Valente is a sorceress, conjuring a story of sorrow and suspense with characters so real we feel their heartbreak, their bewilderment, the horrible chills down their spines. . . . This is a gorgeous book full of mysteries. It scorches with truth, and sings with hope. Valente writes like all of our lives depend on it.”
—Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature
“Written in the collective voice of the community, à la Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Valente artfully employs short chapters on arson and anatomy, as well as diagrams, newspaper articles, and biographies of the victims on the way to an unforgettable ending, with fire serving as a powerfully fitting metaphor for grief, loss, and our inability to comprehend the nature of fate.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Anne Valente is an ambitious author to watch.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Valente has written a poetic page-turner that explores how we grieve in solitude and grieve together, and what the human body endures when that grief overwhelms. Quizzical, melodic, and unforgettable, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down breaks new ground on issues of mass violence, communal loss, and the act of remembrance.”
—Ploughshares
“Valente takes us straight to the heart of the horror in this shocking (but tender and cerebral) book.”
—Buffalo News
“Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a beautifully written, lyrical book wrapped up in a compelling mystery with shades of Stephen King. Gripping and profound, a terrific debut.”
—Kate Hamer, author of The Girl in the Red Coat
“Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a bold examination of a subject that is unimaginably difficult to encapsulate in a way that is neither exploitative nor insensitive to those who have suffered a similar trauma. The subject of school shootings is mentally exhausting for both the writer and the reader, but Valente manages to pull off the emotional gravitas necessary to make this book and its seemingly dark premise work, and, most importantly, spark a conversation about a subject that often feels too heavy to discuss and unpack openly. Valente writes with the ear of a poet and the inquisitive instinct of a journalist. Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a book unflinching in its portrayal of grief, loss, and the frailty of the human heart.”
—Colorado Review
“A breathtaking portrait of violence and its ruinous aftermath. As Anne Valente’s riveting characters navigate the transformed landscape of their hometown, they find themselves awash in devastation and redemption and mystery, and this reader found herself increasingly spellbound by this remarkable and urgent debut novel.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
“An important book for our times.”
—The Masters Review
“A mournful and enigmatic novel from a former St. Louisan, whose recurring exploration of violence, loss and community anguish resonates loudly in these challenging times.”
—Alive magazine
“Lyrical, mysterious, and structurally innovative. . . . This is a book that does not look away. This is a book we need now more than ever.”
—Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under
“Pulsing, eerie, and impossible to put down, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down unearths the grief that raises a Midwestern community in the wake of a school shooting. In acrobatic prose, Anne Valente shows us what tragedy leaves behind: how we ask questions that may be unanswerable.”
—Chloe Benjamin, author of The Anatomy of Dreams
“Valente’s beautiful, elegiac novel about a community in mourning, and the unseen forces that unravel and consume us after a tragedy, is a work of heartbreaking timeliness.”
—J. Ryan Stradal, New York Times bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
“The characterizations are acute and the resolution . . . is tantalizingly thought provoking.”
—Booklist
“Valente’s prose is unique and breathless, full of eloquent turns of phrases and insightful observations. . . . Valente is truly a unique voice in fiction today, knitting together words in ways no one else could.”
—Playback STL
“Gripping, visceral. . . . I couldn’t stop reading—or caring about these characters. . . . There’s a tinge of mythic eeriness to this story . . . but it was the resilient, appealing characters who propelled me through this intense novel, and lingered long after its close.”
—Sharon Guskin, author of The Forgetting Time
“A book we desperately need. . . . One of the most compelling novels I’ve read in years.”
—Matt Bell, author of Scrapper
Also by Anne Valente
Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
By Light We Knew Our Names
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE DESERT SKY BEFORE US. Copyright © 2019 by Anne Valente. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whe
ther electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover handlettering by Joel Holland
Cover photograph © Babak Tafreshi/Getty Images
FIRST EDITION
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Valente, Anne, author.
Title: The desert sky before us : a novel / Anne Valente.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032676 | ISBN 9780062749871 (tp)
Classification: LCC PS3622.A42577 D47 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032676
* * *
Digital Edition MAY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-274988-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-274987-1
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