Quietly,
simply, elegantly, Norman Lock channels, through his "Plain Jane"
narrator, our gorgeous desolation, our longing for connection, both
earthly and divine. The Long Rowing Unto Morning spirits the reader into richly emotional and primal realms; it's a book to return to again and again.
–– Dawn Raffel, Author of Carrying the Body
Norman Lock's The Long Rowing Unto Morning captures
the life of a wounded and hampered individual whom we normally wouldn't
glance at twice, but does so so deftly and so masterfully that by the
end we feel that she's someone we've always been close to. Like Eva
Figes, Lock is interested in exploring the complexities of memory and
perception, in how age and an uncertain arrangement of the mind changes
the world. Lock allows us to see the world through an Other's eyes in
such a way that by the end the difference between us and her seems
little more than a thin sheet of paper, if even that.
–– Brian Evenson, Author of Altmann's Tongue and The Wavering Knife
The narrator of The Long Rowing Unto Morning is unforgettable. This is Norman Lock's best fiction yet.
–– Michael Kimball, Author of The Way the Family Got Away
Suffice
it to say that while Lock and [Noy] Holland share the same deliberately
slow (but by no means methodical) rhythm … the restless gestures
towards a point outside the frame of the picture have, in Lock, been
collapsed until they occupy not gestures, but pulses rippling through
the protagonist's mind like rain.
–– Miles Clark, NewPages Book Reviews
Lock
is interested in one of the most important questions we can encounter:
what it means to be in the world. His metaphors of inaccessibility and
containment are powerful and often devastating forces throughout the
novel. … It is a voice unlike any other.
–– Catherine Spangler, Raven Chronicles
This
is a portrait of a woman who is fully in touch with her own sense of
loneliness and solitude and the slowness of time's passing….No other
book, no other writer in recent memory, lives up to [Whitman's]
declaration that behind every book there is a hand reaching out to us, a
hand to be held onto, a hand that has the power to touch us, to make us
feel.
–– Peter Markus, Detroit Metro Times
