GONE THE SUN

If a book can be a song the pages of Gone the Sun sing. They sing remembering and forgetting. Grief and Endurance. Present and past. In the present time of this memoir-in-fragments Joel Peckham spends a last summer as music director at Manitou the boys camp that has been part of his life since he was a child. Manitou summons Peckham's past-his father his lost wife his lost son. But there are songs of redemption those weeks too. This is a book that sings both back and forward with love urging us all home.Karen Salyer McElmurray author of Voice Lessons and I Could Name God in Twelve Ways In Gone the Sun Peckham writes about his loving sometimes fraught history with Manitou a summer camp he and his father worked at for many years. As his father declines into dementia the middle-aged Peckham-still working summers at the camp between semesters as a college professor-muses upon time upon loss and the various selves we inhabit as we age. This is a beautiful heartbreaking book but heartbreaking in the most resonant emotionally intelligent and illuminating way possible.