David James Duncan

“Sun House is one of the greatest imaginative achievements I have encountered in a lifetime of reading.  Page after page brims with invention, mirth, knowledge, irreverence, and deep wisdom. I know of no one who better captures the beauty of the natural world or the ineffable experience of transcendence… David James Duncan transports the reader into a world more radiant and vivid than this one, or rather into a world just as radiant and vivid as this one, if only we attended to it with the heightened awareness his tale urges us to cultivate.” 

–William deBuys, author of The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss

“The time, energy, focus, precision, invention, scholarship, fun, joy, love, courage and compassion that went into making this novel boggle my mind. Just contemplating its creation is something of a spiritual journey in itself. Finding this kind of expansive refreshment at this most narrow-minded moment in history is a gift.”

RICHARD POWERS author of The Overstory

“Reading Sun House is like watching dawn in the high country. On this bright stage, David James Duncan’s unlikely, perfectly wrought, beloved characters perform a miracle: From ragged strands of tragedy and epiphany, they weave the fabric of a more openhearted world.” —BRYCE ANDREWS, author of Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West

“This is a classic epic novel with twenty-first-century humor and timeless spirituality. I laughed so much and cried just as often. It’s sexy, politically astute, visionary, and bold . . . Read it now.” —SHERMAN ALEXIE, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Sun House resembles the ancient spiritual texts in the everlasting wisdom of its stories, the ecstasy of its language, and the merciless depth of the questions that haunt it. Here is a book like nothing I have ever read, an epic story about how we may be made whole in a broken time.” —KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE, author of Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“Sun House is not a mere book, but a singular world in which to reside, and to feel more alive. Laced with humor and high-lonesome lyricism, this sweeping tale locates the grand in the smallest particulars, reaches its heights by flooding us with light and loss, and arrives, ultimately, in hard-won hope.” —CHRIS DOMBROWSKI, author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water

“It is almost physically painful to spend time away from reading Sun House. I just wanted to drop a note to tell you how in love I am with every character and what a profound romp it has been thus far. My wife has caught me laughing to the point of tears a few times (DSNs and Risa--my good Lord!) and the anti-theology theology is just pulsing through me like lightning. I hate not being able to talk to anyone about it. I have a million questions but I will try to stay in the Ocean as long as I can... I am going to need time to process what I am experiencing but the feelings are many, all of them a cause for marvel. I was completely undone by Jamey’s waltz on the streets of Portland. Yes, it is a broken-openness that saves us.”

“I had to clear some decks before i could plunge fully into your gobsmackingly sublime book. Now I am no more than a tenth of the way through but have the sense of watching a miracle unfold. I am glad it is a zillion pages long. I want it to last. Good on ya, brother. This is something completely singular and wonderful.

It fills me with joy.”

“The last chapter of Sun House is flawless. Not just because the final scene feels simultaneously tender and explosive, but also because it demonstrates in full view the actual beauty of this community as they put their collective shoulder to the wheel, not for a farmer’s market or barn-raising, but for something inarguably universal and beautiful, the death of a human being. The one thing we all have in common. All those soul threads vibrating together in perfect pitch, illustrating what humanity being in sync actually looks like, and offering the reader a glimpse of our potential with so much to aspire to.”

“Sun House is the most moving, transformative, provocative, singular treasure-of-a-book I have ever read... There is a specific way to manifest hope now! I feel a renewed sense of what my life, and other’s lives, can be because of your book. I can’t wait to be along on the journey as Sun House ramifies into the spirit of each reader, each person like me, heart-broken-open, that needs a new map for now.”

“Postcard #11: How Two Men Who Have Yet to Sit in Ass-On-the-Ground Chairs and Drink Whiskey by a Damp-log Fire Do Just That Through the Magical Mystery of Mere Words

Just twenty-six letters. In this language anyway. And none of them outlandishly different from any of the others. Haikus. Manifestos. Suicide Notes. Treasure Maps. Constitutions. Divorce Papers. Novels. The Bible. Postcards. Proems. All of them born from the same twenty-six squiggly lines. Seems bat-shit crazy until I remember the blues, concertos, nursery rhymes, hip hop, Cajun and heavy metal are all born from the same twelve notes. 

The heavy lift of those twelve notes aside, it’s still a strobe of marvelous magic that your meticulous arrangement of those squiggly lines carries all the spark and heat and intimacy of in-the-flesh, on-the-ground, camp-fire-infused, whiskey-enhanced experience. It’s a mystery how a story pinned so thoroughly to the flat page swells and floats, wafts and winds, sifts and settles into huge and unseen dimensions. 

Risa said it best in her Dumbsaint Journal: "How simple, the reason the company of these people feels so very right: they don’t ever let go of their threads.”

So hang onto your thread while passing that damn boulder through your wanger. Hang on while the love and dreams of your home get carved up by accountants. Hang on while your friend prepares to walk into the woods.  

And I’ll hang onto mine too. And know that your words make those invisible threads so much easier to see.”

“The naked openness of your characters’ seeking after understanding and acceptance moves me deeply... This novel is truly a remarkable achievement, David, I’ve never read the like. It’s long, it’s corny sometimes, it’s idealistic, but it goes deep, and far, into the biggest subjects there are, it captures striving, and loving, and all the ways we err, it’s learned but never didactic. It’s so full of love for its characters, and its subjects, that it sweeps the reader up completely.”

“I say that all my wealth is in my friends… What the years and this book have made even more clear, how deeply important friendship and love are in growing a life and a soul. This is the quote that I think is the highest tribute to the work:  "I began to think of Sun House less as a book than as a location, a place to go and hang out, a refuge, a hideout, an environment to absorb."  That is how I feel with friends - the refuge, and the love. And that you created this in a book that people can escape into is an accomplishment of a lifetime it seems to me. It's not really "yours" anymore.  Now it's your friend, Bill's, your editor, Michael’s, and the thousands who will read it while you're still here and will go on reading it when you're not. Steinbeck has been, for me, what has gotten me through the last year - his land, his places, his families that were just in his head at one time, and now they're in mine.  I live in those worlds. Now I'm just rambling, but I love that, especially now, you can hear those words of love and friendship.  They ring so beautifully true.  You will hear many, many more in the years to come. You continue to have mine.  Bravo my friend. Looking forward to reading it - cover to cover.”