Novelist Kent Haruf has often drawn on his upbringing on the sparse eastern plains of Colorado. But in his latest novel, Benediction, Haruf inches closer to his roots than he ever has. One of his central characters is a minister in a small town church that’s much like the ones that Haruf grew up in as the son of a Methodist minister.
Paula Huston’s novel follows Eva, a tough young American photojournalist, as she searches for her brother Stefan, a priest who has gone missing into the Lacandon jungle, a hotspot of guerilla warfare in southern Mexico in 1993. Eva takes a job with a Dutch archaeologist, and in the process of documenting Mayan hieroglyphs she finds herself drawn into a story and conflict that her experience as a war photographer did not prepare her for.