Skip to main content

Then Came the Evening

About the Book

Then Came the Evening

Bandy Dorner, a Vietnam veteran, awakes from an alcoholic bender to learn that his cabin has burnt to the ground, with his wife, Iona, presumed inside. Reeling from his losses, Bandy shoots and kills a police officer. Meanwhile Iona, alive and well, walks away from the ashes of her old life, without telling her new boyfriend that she is pregnant with Bandy’s child.

Eighteen years later, as Bandy awaits parole, he learns that he has a son, Tracy. Now that he is an adult, Tracy wants to reclaim his grandparents’ house in Lake Fork, Idaho. He is eager to prove himself in Lake Fork --- and to get away from his mother, Iona, who has turned reckless after her second husband’s death. When Tracy suffers a near-fatal accident, Iona returns to Lake Fork for the first time in eighteen years. Bandy makes his way home, too, ravaged from his time in prison and unsure how to fit in with his ex-wife and son. Just as the three Dorners begin to rebuild their broken family, Bandy is forced commit one last crime. Iona and Tracy, abandoned again, resist the gravitational pull of land and family, staking new claims in their modernizing town. As Bandy struggles to return home, yet again, he must face the broken pieces of a family shattered by violence.

Then Came the Evening
by Brian Hart

  • Publication Date: December 21, 2010
  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
  • ISBN-10: 1608194698
  • ISBN-13: 9781608194698