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The town of New Eden, peopled with hereditary oddities, has arrived at its last days
As two near-centenarian citizens prepare for their annual birthday tea, a third vows to interrupt the proceedings with a bold declaration. The Remnants cartwheels rambunctiously through the lives of wood-splitters, garment-menders, and chervil farmers, while exposing an electrical undercurrent of secrets, taboos, and unfulfilled longings. With his signature wit and wordplay, Robert Hill delivers a bittersweet gut-buster of an elegy to the collective memory of a community. Reading The Remnants reminded me of Pound''s conviction ''that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.'' Robert Hill bridges this gulf even more directly, writing sentences that not only sing but dance, full of whisks and sways and sprightly little sidesteps of language. How would they look, I began to wonder, if you diagrammed them? Like pinwheels, I imagine. Like fireworks. Try to fasten them down and they''d still keep moving. Aû Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination Bold, brilliant, and touching, The Remnants is a eulogy for a world in which humanity is treasured-a celebration of life in all its imperfect glory. Aû Rene Denfeld, author of The Enchanted ''Nobody wants to be compared to James Joyce. Especially, I''d imagine, Robert Hill. So I won''t. But in Hill''s novel, The Remnants, like Leopold Bloom, Kennesaw Belvedere wakes up one fine morning and goes forth into his beloved city. Along his way, worlds open up into worlds, stories beget stories beget stories, and characters live and breathe and die of just about every ailment in the almanac. Really you wonder how you can go on with all the living and the breathing and the dying, but Hill''s language is such a thing of rare beauty that you love every moment. And when Hunko finds Kennesaw, and Molly and Leopold are yes, of all the brilliant moments in the novel, there''s one final brilliant moment, one perfectly still moment, when all is well in a decaying world. If you love language and if you love narrative and if you love stories, don''t pass up The Remnants.'' Aû Tom Spanbauer, author of I Loved You More Hill''s characters are so precisely written, they feel as real as you and me, despite the generations of inbreeding, which have left them somewhere off the ''normal'' scale. Yet, these folks love and hope and yearn like the rest of us, and their stories are magical. Hill has the silver tongue of a master wordsmith. His gorgeous prose rambles from hilarious to sly to clever, and then doubles back so it can dive right off into beautiful, heartsick and poignant. A standout story with unbelievablyeffective prose, The Remnants is one of my favorite 2016 titles. Aû Dianah Hughley, bookseller, Powell''s City of Books ''What a lyric and wild romp of language, life, love. Reading The Remnants reminded me why I love to read, why I love to write.'' Aû Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight The sentences in The Remnants coil inward, and then look back to nudge and wink at us with puns and wordplay. Beneath their delight the novel speaks to us of that most primal urge, the urge to procreate. In The Remnants that urge runs amuck, defying the boundaries humans have placed upon it in order that the species might not turn in upon itself. That urge carries with it the desire for connection, for a bond with another human, the two urges inextricably wound around each other, and in New Eden the possibilities are so limited that the
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