A Prayer for the Dying (20 page)

—David Kipen,
San Francisco Chronicle

“Stewart O’Nan could well be the best unsung American writing fiction.… O’Nan’s most haunting book to date, a gripping work of raw power … a story that leaves footprints across the soul.”

—Robin Vidimos,
The Denver Post

“As eloquent as it is unsettling.”

—Elizabeth Bukowski,
The Wall Street Journal

“A deeply unsettling and sophisticated horror story … O’Nan transforms this seemingly conventional tale about a good man struggling against terrible circumstances into a brilliant exploration of evil and solipsism.”

—Megan Harlan,
Entertainment Weekly

“Powerful, beautiful … A brief, mesmerizing novel that chills the bones, crushes the heart.”

—Jerome Weeks,
The Dallas Morning News

“A horror story of subtlety and elegance that coaxes the reader from one shiveringly delicious conclusion to the next.”

—Helen Verongos,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“O’Nan takes his already noir sensibility and turns it up a notch. He has created a spare, ominous portrait of a small Wisconsin town in the years after the Civil War, and the result is as subtle and insistent as an autumnal twilight.”

—Gail Caldwell,
The Boston Globe

ALSO BY STEWART O’NAN

Songs for the Missing

Last Night at the Lobster

The Good Wife

The Night Country

Wish You Were Here

Everyday People

A World Away

The Speed Queen

The Names of the Dead

Snow Angels

STORIES

In the Walled City

NONFICTION

The Circus Fire

Faithful
(with Stephen King)

AS EDITOR

The Vietnam Reader

On Writers and Writing
(by John Gardner)

Stewart O’Nan is the author of eleven novels, including
Songs for the Missing
and
Snow Angels,
a story collection, and two works of nonfiction. His previous novel,
Last Night at the Lobster,
was a national bestseller and was nominated for the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize and was named one of the New York Public Library’s Books to Remember. Additionally,
Granta
named him one of the twenty Best Young American Novelists. O’Nan lives with his family in Avon, Connecticut.

A PRAYER FOR THE DYING
. Copyright © 1999 by Stewart O’Nan. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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E-mail: [email protected]

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42891-4

ISBN-10: 0-312-42891-X

First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company

First Picador Edition: April 2000

Second Picador Edition: June 2009

eISBN 9781466853256

First eBook edition: August 2013