Old Fires
by Josh Patrick Sheridan
Praise for Josh Patrick Sheridan
“Visceral and deep. You’ll feel it in your gut: the memories, the mud, the desperate times when you’re alone and truly don’t know if you should stand up or sink. Sheridan powerfully explores a hard, familiar question. When our best hopes collapse into the past, can we trust another hope or vision of the future?”
–Dennis Mahoney, author of Bell Weather: A Novel
“A bereaved widower embarks on a fateful journey in Josh Patrick Sheridan’s spiritual novel, Old Fires. Sentence fragments depict a disconsolate man in a barren landscape, searching for something he does not understand. And yet he is surrounded by life: in the creeks, the forests, the hollers, and even the memories of the times and stories he shared with Grace, his wife. Things still grow, just as Tim himself is alive and growing. Whether he can learn this in time to keep from taking irreversible action is anyone’s guess. Old Fires is a dark novel about the heavy burden of grief.”
–Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews
“‘When spring comes in Appalachia, all is made clear: this is the reason. This is the reason,’ writes Josh Patrick Sheridan in his elegiac first novel, Old Fires. Sheridan’s haunting tale probes all our dark seasons—the self-evident darknesses of war and loss, but also of fraternity, faith and family—as it examines the search for a place of blossoming.”
–Dave King, author of the national bestseller, The Ha-Ha
“Old Fires is a gorgeous, heartbreaking piece of Southern fiction as well as a moving exploration of love, loss, and the limits of faith. In addition, this novel offers a glorious introduction to the work of an incredibly talented young writer.”
–Edward Schwarzschild, Professor, Director of Creative Writing, and Fellow of the New York State Writers Institute