“Family secrets slowly unravel in Huddle’s (The Story of a Million Years) account of a large family and their effervescent patriarch, Horace Houseman. His granddaughter, Eve, reveals his secret as the novel opens, and though it seems absurd and over blown to her, as the story progresses, it means much more. Each chapter divulges the innermost thoughts of those who lived the moments and felt the betrayal, successfully articulating a beloved granddaughter’s blind conviction, a son-in-law’s honesty, a dear friend’s turmoil, and a grieving wife’s sadness and anger. The sexual escapades of nearly every character pepper the pages with lucid passion and allow a peek into the eroticism of each relationship. These moments are honest and sexually charged, though sometimes illicit and disturbing. Each person’s perspective on sex reveals their differences, usually having some correlation to their generation and experience. Huddle’s novel is ravishing, charged with both desire and emotional turmoil; his insights, though sometimes unsettling, skillfully mirror reality.”

— Publishers Weekly

“I have had the experience of starting a poem and having it end up as a novella — a book I published, ’Tenorman,’ started out as that. I guess I am more of a short-story writer than anything else. The three novels I have published, all three of them are made up mostly of short stories that I wrote as chapters of the book. The chapters seem like short stories and most of them were published as short stories. So doing that is the only method for me to try to write a novel. I have attempted in the past to write them in what I think of as the normal way, writing the beginning of the story and working my way to the end, but that does not work for me, so I have several novels that haven’t been completed that are sitting in my attic.”

– The Burlington Free Press (interview with David Huddle as well as an excerpt from his new novel)