Title: The tie that binds
First published: 1984
Description: Colorado, January 1977.  Eighty-year-old Edith Goodnough lies in a hospital bed, IV taped to the back of her hand, police officer at her door.  She is charged with murder.  The clues: a sack of chicken feed slit with a knife, a milky-eyed dog tied outdoors one cold afternoon.  The motives: the brutal business of farming and a family code of ethics as unforgiving as the winter prairie itself.
In his critically acclaimed first novel, Kent Haruf delivers the sweeping tale of a woman of the American High Plains, as told by her neighbor, Sanders Roscoe.  As Roscoe shares what he knows, Edith's tragedies unfold: a childhood of pre-dawn chores, a mother's death, a violence that leaves a father dependent on his children, forever enraged.  Here is the story of a woman who sacrifices her happiness in the name of family - and then, in one gesture, reclaims her freedom.  Breathtaking, determinedly truthful, *The Tie That Binds* is a powerfully eloquent tribute to the arduous demands of rural America, and of the tenacity of the human spirit.
From the paperback edition.
Subjects: Fiction, Older women, Frontier and pioneer life, Fiction, historical, general, Frontier and pioneer life, fiction, Colorado, fiction, Fiction, psychological, Fiction, family life, general, Fiction, general, Psychological fiction
Places: Colorado