The second Kent Haruf novel I've read this year, and a bit more substantial than Our Souls at Night. Plainsong follows a number of separate characters whose lives intersect in a town called Holt, in the USA's Great Plains, roughly in the present day. Haruf's prose is very plain and unsentimental, but the lives he draws are mostly very sad. That's not to say the novel is entirely without humour, there's a laconic, rural humour here that New Zealanders will recognise. The characters are flawed and struggling, but mostly decent at heart, striving to do the right thing against all odds. It's in Richard Ford territory, really, with a dose of Annie Proulx. I loved it.