Blue Sabine
Blue Sabine
 
 
Publisher: Moon City Press, Fall 2011
Blue Sabine is a story of five generations of Holt women, told in their voices, along with some men of Holt blood. It is set along the Sabine River, which divides the state of Texas from Louisiana and the Deep South. From 1867--when the Holts first came to Texas--to the present, the novel chronicles the emotional lives of grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and nieces, all bound by kinship and history. Each comes to terms with being a woman in the West, in Texas, and in her own way and her own time.

 

Reviews of Blue Sabine
"In this beautifully written, wondrously told novel by Gerald Duff, one family's personal history mergeswith the larger currents of Texan and American history, creating a twisting, turning narrative that is as aesthetically satisfying as it is historically resonant. ... a major literary talent." -- Steven L. Davis, Southwestern Historial Quarterly
"Blue Sabine is a lyrical, unsentimental interior portrait of the frustrations and trials of the Holt family, told by the family's matriarch and five generations of her descendents....Duff is successful in creating human, relatable characters; a reader may well pause for self-examination during some of the narrators' more reflective moments. This book makes readers feel keenly the weight of their own past and consider the weight carried by those they love" -- Amber Peckham, TriQuarterly Online
"Blue Sabine is a big, spellbinding novel, as deep and complex as the Texas river for which it's named. The mystery and relevance of the past is Gerald Duff's great theme, as he masterfully traces one family's history from the Civil War to the present day. His great characters are all astonishing storytellers, with true and compelling voices that will ring in my head forever." --Lee Smith, author of Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger and On Agate Hill
"Blue Sabine [is] a veritable saga of insights, intimacies, and intimations. The characters are obsessed with their family, and the reader is completely caught up in this American story set in the historic valley of the Sabine" --Roy Blount Jr., author of Alphabetter Juice: The Joy of Text
"This book is a bottomless pit of contextual aphorisms and southern insights, and it might even remind some men and women of Southeast Texas of the stories told to them by their grandfathers and grandmothers." --Brandon James, The Port Arthur News
"The oil fields and pine woods of East Texas are a locale rarely visited upon in fiction, and setting is the silent character lurking from the riverbed in Blue Sabine, which will haunt you long after you've closed its pages" --Vanessa Blakeslee, The Kenyon Review

To obtain copies of Blue Sabine, order online at:
Moon City Press
Amazon.com 
Barnes & Noble