Forty years after the suicide of his best friend’s father, a writer revisits the tragedy and tries to unravel the mystery behind one man’s inexplicable actions on that icy January day in 1961. Through his own recollections and his fiction-sometimes impossible to separate-he attempts to make sense of a senseless act and, in the process, to examine his youth, his connection to his best friend, Gene, and the enigma of Marie, a beautiful girl whose heart once belonged to both of them and whose spell still lingers through the decades.

Spare, haunting, lyrical, Sundown, Yellow Moon is a piercing study of love and betrayal, grief and desire, youth and remembrance. Larry Watson not only brings to life a distinct period in history but, most affectingly, reveals the interplay of memory, secrets, and the passage of time.

Praise for Sundown, Yellow Moon:

Watson succeeds impressively, especially in deepening our understanding of first love.
-Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

A marvelous evocation of a time and place and of high school existence when it was considerably less ferocious than it is today … [Sundown, Yellow Moon] twitches aside the curtain to reveal the menace and mendacity lurking behind placid and mundane lives.
-Minneapolis Star Tribune

[An] oddly heartbreaking story: allowed to run amok, the past becomes a monster capable of devouring the present.
-Booklist

Larry Watson takes the less-traveled roads, through landscapes and heartscapes vaguely familiar, intensely poetic and always jangling… . He has established himself as one of the leading poetic realists, painting his stories across the canvas of interiors: small-town America and the human heart.
-San Jose Mercury News, on Orchard