The Remnants - by Robert Hill (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

As the wind picks up and the sky grays over, Kennesaw trudges the remaining miles into town, catching his breath by the hole in the stone wall at Nedewen Field where dust returns to dust. He passes the broken stone markers that show their old age like chipped teeth in a mouth full of mourning, and lays to rest the memories of those who have gone before him. He continues on down the gravel road and crosses the tangled patch that had once been the village green, and past the strip of acre beside the barn behind True's house where the prized row of Granny-Macs once stood. It's taken him all of the morning and most of the afternoon and much of the last ninety-nine years to reach here. The weather is due to turn calamitous. Kennesaw runs a moist hand across his moist scalp as he continues on his way to True's. He approaches her plain front gate where he rests a moment before starting up again and making his way up her walkway and onto her front stone slab, which is only a pebble less settled than his.

One arm pumping and then the other. One leg shuffling and then the other. One ache and then another and then another and then another. And this is how the aged walk into heaven.

He's ninety-nine. It's been a long journey. Tea sounds good to him.

Robert Hill's second novel, The Remnants, is an ebullient ode to the last days of the last three residents of the town of New Eden. It follows his highly acclaimed debut, When All Is Said and Done (Graywolf Press, 2006), which was shortlisted for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and touted as "a bravura and resounding performance" by Donna Seaman of Booklist.

Review Quotes

"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."
- 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."
- 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."
- 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 unbelievably effective prose, The Remnants is one of my favorite 2016 titles."
- 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."
- 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 distinctions between one family and the next have all but disappeared."
- Stevan Allred, author of A Simplified Map of the Real World

"Wholly unexpected and unique, Hill fills his bewitching telling of the last days of a small town and its few remaining genetically compromised residents with wordplay that belies the power of connection, memory, and community."
- Elisa Saphier, lead bookseller and owner, Another Read Through

"Such extravagant, rambunctious delicious language! And a sad and wonderful story of the end of the town of New Eden and its inbred and lyrical inhabitants. I have never read a book like this before. It defies genre."
- Cindy Heidemann, field sales, Legato Publishers Group

"It is for aficionados, for readers who let sentences dissolve blissfully on their tongues, for those who can't help but swoon over the playful and well-executed marriage of high diction to character names like Intermediate Hurlbutt and Righteous Whiskerhooven. It's a masterpiece meant not for plot-lovers, but for literati on the search for an uncommon satisfaction."
- Brandi Dawn Henderson, PosLit

"Fans of Margaret Atwood will love the dystopian end-of-the-world themes, older readers will appreciate the elderly protagonists, literary fiction lovers will connect to the clever word play, and others will love the juxtaposition of humor with dark themes. A most original novel!"
- Sarah H., Book People, March Book Club Corner

"Hill's text reads like poetry spoken in a long Southern drawl. You could read this book on the porch with a mint julep and a heartache. And the names! Carnival, Jubilee, Frainey, Hunko. Each character is their own ecosystem, like finches on Galapagos, cut off from the continent. Hill likens them to jellyfish, Egyptians, and clay. They are spinning in their own orbits, watching the sun fade."
- Stephanie Bonjack, Lit Reactor

Praise for Robert Hill's When All Is Said and Done (Graywolf Press, 2006)

"There's nothing like an exhilarating first novel to rejuvenate a literature lover's faith in fiction's power to throw open the doors of perception. ... Hill has written a breakneck, wisecracking, tenderhearted, socially revealing portrait of an unusual early 1960s American marriage. ... Every aspect of this agile, intoxicating, hilarious, and poignant novel is compelling, but what elevates it is the exhuberant language. Hill writes with velocity, rhythm, and wit, conveying a world of subtle emotions and social nuance in brilliantly syncopated inner monologues and staccato dialogue, creating a bravura and resounding performance."
- Donna Seaman, Booklist

"With evocative, freewheeling prose ('the run-on sentences that were her married life'), Hill ... nimbly salvages one family's striving from an era of grasping and consumerism."
- Publishers Weekly

"In flitting seamlessly from the mundane details of daily life to broader questions of love, family, priorities and death, the author has created a startlingly realistic depiction of the way the mind functions."
- Kirkus Reviews

"Finally, there is Hill's virtuosity as a word stylist. He is audacious in experimenting with the sound and pace and rhythm of language to convey personality, mood, and social status ... overall, this is a witty, generous, heartbreaking book which seeks ... 'the common green in our beings'--and finds it."
- Barbarba McMichael, The Olympian

About the Author

Robert Hill is a New Englander by birth, a West Coaster by choice, and an Oregonian by osmosis. As a writer, he has worked in advertising, entertainment, educational software, and not-for-profit fundraising. He is a recipient of a Literary Arts Walt Morey Fellowship, a Breadloaf Writers Conference Fellowship, and his first novel, "When All Is Said and Done" (Graywolf, 2006), was shortlisted for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction.