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Fall, in its first weeks, scatters its footprints through the Shenandoah Valley---mist and color, shadow and cold---sparsely at first, and then with greater fury. As Our Burden’s Light opens, two families are caught on either side of a moment of small-town violence; subsequently fighting desperately to find their separate ways out of its grasp. One family combusts under the weight of loss, while the other is quietly buried by it.
Debut novelist Patrick Thomas Casey reimagines the Edenic story of being cast out of paradise, using the lens of contemporary America and the poignant stories of three people knotted together. Our Burden’s Light traces the arcs of innocence and its loss, memory and love, home and its inevitable vanishing, which turn through Casey’s beautifully-rendered characters’ fracturing lives, in a chorus of voices moving ever farther away from the valley they once shared. This is a powerful entrée by a talented new voice in literary fiction.
PATRICK THOMAS CASEY was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and now lives in New Orleans
“In Our Burden’s Light, Patrick Thomas Casey hunts big game: sex and love, memory and loss. And---with a piercing eye for detail, an ear for rhythm, and great empathy---he grabs ample fistfuls of each. This is brave and beautiful writing."
---Josh Weil, author of The New Valley
“Evidently, Patrick Thomas Casey was somebody’s big secret until now. I just don’t know how they kept him from us. No one writes this good the first time out, do they?
Casey’s Our Burden’s Light is so much more than a promising first novel by a formidably talented writer; it is a literary achievement of the first order. Casey has breathed life into his desperate characters, and they breathed life into me. I can’t forget them. I don’t want to. Casey knows that every story is many stories, and he handles the complex intersecting tales of loss, death, and unspeakable secrets with intelligence, grace, and lyricism.”
---John Dufresne, author of Requiem, Mass.
“From the opening paragraph of Our Burden’s Light, I knew I was reading a writer of extraordinary talent. Patrick Thomas Casey is an exciting new voice in American fiction, and this striking debut should gain him a wide and appreciative audience.”
---Ron Rash, author of Serena
