Harpsong

by Rilla Askew

A love story about Dust Bowl heroes who didn’t leave for California
Harlan Singer, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family’s yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter with his charm. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two more hobos of the Great Depression, hitchhiking and hopping freights across the Great Plains in search of an old man and the settlement of Harlan’s long-standing debt.
Finding shelter in hobo jungles and Hoovervilles, the newlyweds career across the 1930s landscape in a giant figure eight with Oklahoma in the middle. Sharon’s growing doubts about her husband’s quest set in motion events that turn Harlan Singer into a hero while blinding her to the dark secret of his journey. A love story infused with history and folk tradition, Harpsong shows what happened to the friends and neighbors Steinbeck’s Joads left behind.
In this moving, redemptive tale inspired by Oklahoma folk heroes, Rilla Askew continues her exploration of the American story. Harpsong is a novel of love and loss, of adventure and renewal, and of a wayfaring orphan’s search for home—all set to the sounds of Harlan’s harmonica. It shows us the strength and resilience of a people who, in the face of unending despair, maintain their faith in the land.

(From Publisher).

Rilla Askew, born and raised in eastern Oklahoma, is the award-winning author of a collection of stories, Strange Business and two novels, The Mercy Seat (PEN/Faulkner nominee, Oklahoma Book Award, and Western Heritage Award), and Fire in Beulah (American Book Award and Myers Book Award). She teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma and lives in Oklahoma and New York

Passionately imagined, plaintive, compelling and vivid. Harpsong tells the wonderful and desperate story of a harmonica-playing troubadour and his young wife as they travel around the American plains during the Great Depression. It is a story of hard luck, people struggling in hard times, of bank foreclosures and hunger and failing farms. Harpsong is also a story of faith, endurance and never-ending hope which resonates deeply in the current era, when lost homes, rising food prices, and the spectre of profound hunger haunt ordinary citizens in the U.S. and around the world.