Bøker av Devin Murphy

From the nationally bestselling author of The Boat Runner comes a luminous novel that follows one family over decades and across the world.Western New York, 1978: Jamie, Lewis, and Connor Thurber watch their parents' destructive dance of loving, hating, and drinking.Terrance Thurber spends this year teaching his children about the natural world: they listen to the heartbeat of trees, track animal footprints, sleep under the star-filled sky. Despite these lessons, he doesn't show them how to survive without him. When these seasons of trying and failing to quit booze and be a better man are over, Terrance is gone.Alone with their artist mother, Catrin, the Thurber children are left to grapple with the anger they feel for the one parent who deserted them and a growing resentment for the one who didn't. As Catrin withdraws into her own world, Jamie throws herself into painting while her brothers smash out their rage in brutal, no-holds-barred football games with neighborhood kids. Once they can leave?Jamie for college, Lewis for the navy, and Connor for work?they don't look back.But Terrance does. Crossing the country, sobering up, and starting over have left him with razor-sharp regret. Terrance doesn't know that Jamie, now an academic, inhabits an ever-shrinking circle of loneliness; that Lewis, a merchant marine, fears life on dry land; that Connor struggles to connect with the son he sees teetering on an all-too-familiar edge. He only knows that he has one last try to build a bridge, through the years, to his family.

The linked stories in UNBEND THE RIVER are set along a forested stretch of land between Lake Erie and the upper Allegheny River in Western New York, places dense with rivers, hills, and forest. The characters, all of whom are tied to a modern knife manufacturing plant, illustrate all the ways love and longing shapeshift over the course of a long life. A host of elderly hockey players, Franciscan Friars, loser heroes, budding conmen, and unintentional historians are all wired to search for meaning. Each flash their creative genius when fighting off idleness, anger, and disappointment. They build nightmare hotrods and race school buses; train wild dogs, homing pigeons, and dancing horses; and fight wildfires and grasshopper swarms. They crash headlong into the chaos, confusion, and confluence of their homes, never losing their energy to seek out the essential miracles hidden all around them.

National Bestseller In the tradition of All The Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale, comes an incandescent debut novel about a young Dutch man who comes of age during the perilousness of World War II.Beginning in the summer of 1939, fourteen-year-old Jacob Koopman and his older brother, Edwin, enjoy lives of prosperity and quiet contentment. Many of the residents in their small Dutch town have some connection to the Koopman lightbulb factory, and the locals hold the family in high esteem. On days when they aren’t playing with friends, Jacob and Edwin help their Uncle Martin on his fishing boat in the North Sea, where German ships have become a common sight. But conflict still seems unthinkable, even as the boys’ father naively sends his sons to a Hitler Youth Camp in an effort to secure German business for the factory.When war breaks out, Jacob’s world is thrown into chaos. The Boat Runner follows Jacob over the course of four years, through the forests of France, the stormy beaches of England, and deep within the secret missions of the German Navy, where he is confronted with the moral dilemma that will change his life—and his life’s mission—forever. Epic in scope and featuring a thrilling narrative with precise, elegant language, The Boat Runner tells the little-known story of the young Dutch boys who were thrown into the Nazi campaign, as well as the brave boatmen who risked everything to give Jewish refugees safe passage to land abroad. Through one boy’s harrowing tale of personal redemption, here is a novel about the power of people’s stories and voices to shine light through our darkest days, until only love prevails.