Laird Hunt Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Laird Hunt
Laird Hunt was born on April 3, 1968 in Singapore. He grew up in San Francisco, Singapore, London, and The Hague before he moved to his grandma’s farm in rural Indiana, where he attended Clinton Central High School.

Laird got his BA from Indiana University and Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He studied French literature at the Sorbonne.

Laird worked in the press at the United Nations as he wrote his first novel. He is a professor in the Creative Writing program at University of Denver.

His influences include Franz Kafka, Georges Perec, Samuel Beckett, and W. G. Sebald, as well as the French Modernists.

Besides writing fiction, he has also translated several novels from French, including Stuart Merrill’s “Paul Verlaine” and Oliver Rohe’s “Vacant Lot”.

He was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction Best Book for “Kind One” and was shortlisted for a National Book Award for Fiction for his novel “Zorrie”. He won a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for fiction for “Kind One” and won a 2015 Grand Prix de Litterature Americaine for “Neverhome”.

“The Impossibly” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2001. An assassin takes a sabbatical in order to focus on love, his bosses are unhappy.

The anonymous narrator botches an assignment from the clandestine organization which employs him, everybody in his life becomes a participant in his punishment. In the end, he gets called out of retirement for a last assignment: to identify and seek out his own assassin.

“Indiana, Indiana” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 2003. In the middle of the county in the center of Indiana right in the heart of the country, and down a dark, long hallway. Noah Summers, who is a simple man that has led a not so simple life, sits before a roaring fire, while drifting in and out of sleep. On this lovely and dark winter night, he’ll sift through shards of his memories, attempting to make some sense of a lifetime of psychic visions and his family’s tumultuous history on the Indiana farmstead.

Noah, as a young man, a true innocent, fell deeply in love with a young woman with a penchant for flames, named Opal. Once they got married, this couple moved into their own house on the family’s farm. After just forty-two days, she gets overcome with her fascination with fire and gets institutionalized. Even though Noah embarks on a journey to save Opal, he is unsuccessful, and has to rely only on her letters instead, his memories, and his family’s strength to sustain him.

This is a surreal and compelling beautiful Midwestern saga that is firmly grounded in an Indiana landscape that is populated by drifters, farmers, ministers, and sheriffs, and overflows with musical saws, appliances left rusting in the fields, and flowers crammed into bibles.

“The Exquisite” is the third stand alone novel and was released in the year 2006. Henry is a New Yorker left destitute by obsession and circumstance, gets plucked from vagrancy by a shadowy crew that has a decidely niche business. They arrange these staged murders of anxiety-ridden clients that are unhinged by the “events downtown” and looking to experience, and live through, their own carefully carried out assassinations.

Once Henry joins this nefarious outfit, which includes this beautiful blonde tattoo artist called Tulip, a woman only referred to as “the knockout”, and contortionist twins, he becomes inextricably connected to the enigmatic ringleader. This mysterious herring connoisseur Mr. Kindt’s identity can be traced back through turns and twists on back to the corpse that is depicted in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson.

“Ray of the Star” is the fourth stand alone novel and was released in the year 2009. Set in a dream-like European city that is reminiscent of Barcelona, along a boulevard that teems with artists that perform as living statues, comes a frightening and beautiful tale of a guy running away from his past, a woman consumed by grief, and the forces pursuing both of them.

Harry, new to the city, is drawn to the boulevard, especially Solange, this silver and silent angel awash in Lucite tears and her heartbreak. Haunted by a mysterious tragedy of his own yet determined to woo her, he visits Almundo’s store for Living Statues and starts his transformation into the golden ‘Knight of the Woeful Countenance’.

“Kind One” is the fifth stand alone novel and was released in the year 2012. Ginny, as a teenage girl, marries Linus Lancaster, her mom’s second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm located “ninety miles from nowhere”. Ginny, in the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, learns of the empty promises of Linus’ “paradise”, a place where the charms of her husband fall away and reveal a cruel slave owner and a troubled man.

Ginny befriends Zinnia and Cleome, two young slaves that work on the farm. Until Linus’ attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her only companions and Linus. The events that follow Linus’ death change all three of these women for life.

This is a powerful story of human endurance and redemption in antebellum America.

“Neverhome” is the sixth stand alone novel and was released in the year 2014. She calls herself Ash, however that isn’t her real name. She is the faithful wife of a farmer, yet she’s left her husband in order to don the uniform of a Union soldier during the Civil War. This tells the story about Ash Thompson’s harrowing journey during the battle for the South. Through hysteria, heartbreak, and bloodshed, she becomes a folk legend, a hero, a madwoman, and a traitor to the American cause.

Laird’s novel throws new light on the adventurous women that decided to fight it out rather than stay behind. It’s also a mystery story: Why would she leave and her husband remain at home? Why can’t she return? What is she going to have to endure in order to return back home?

Laird’s rebellious, young heroine fights through history, and returns back home to her husband, and at last into our hearts.