Bruce Holbert describes “The Hour of Lead” as “a story of the isolation inherent in the miles between people in a still unsettled place,” where those distances turn people “strange and sometimes mean.” Set in the rough farm and ranch land of eastern Washington, the novel follows the lives of several people from 1918 to the late ’70s.
At age 10, Matt Lawson survives a historic blizzard that kills his twin brother and father. (“The Hour of Lead” takes its title from a passage in Emily Dickinson’s “poem 372” concerning freezing in the snow:
This is the Hour of Lead — ...