Dear friend,
Something like forty years ago, I fell in love with an over-the-transom submission by one David James Duncan, a first novel about fishing, nature, family, and higher matters, called The River Why. Though I was unsuccessful at persuading my bosses then of the novel’s virtues, it went on to be published in 1983 by Sierra Club Press, where I watched it sell and sell and become a cult favorite.
You know the rest, or some of it, I hope. In 1992, Duncan published The Brothers K, often cited as one of the great novels about baseball (and brothers, and war), and in 2001 the amazing essay collection and National Book Award Finalist My Story as Told by Water. In 2006, while Publisher of Little, Brown, I was thrilled to hear from David again and to have the opportunity to sign up the third novel he was in the throes of writing.
Now, sixteen wonderful years later, here you have it: the novel that I will immodestly call David’s magnum opus, Sun House. I say wonderful because I’ve never been on such a journey with a writer, seeing him wrestle chapter by chapter to achieve something big, true, lasting, wildly entertaining, and deeply moving. Sun House takes on some of the biggest topics fiction can engage with: faith, love, death, connecting with other people and the natural world, right living in a corrupted world. Its dramatis personae include restaurateurs, tech workers, nature guides, ranchers, musicians, scholars, actors, bankers, a Jesuit, and a heartbroken farmer, to name only a few. It’s funny, learned, sweet, wide open, and unapologetically hopeful. I’ve laughed and sobbed through some of its scenes dozens of times as I’ve read them over these years. I commend it to you wholeheartedly, wishing you the same pleasures: please dive in! It’s long, but every time I’ve finished reading it, I’ve wished it went on longer. I hope you’ll feel the same.
Yours,
Michael Pietsch
CEO
Hachette Book Group