Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Gravier Gambit

The Gravier Gambit

Paperback

Christian FictionGeneral Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798186864738
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 286
Weight: 0.73
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Some stories only make sense when you read them backward.

The chess board in the Gravier's Bend Historical Society has been rearranging itself for thirty-one years. No one has ever seen a piece move. Ilse Hartmann, who has dusted it every morning since 1995, stopped asking how a long time ago. She keeps a different question now: who is it moving for?

Nora Collier left the Missouri river town at eighteen and built the life she asked for: a byline, a city, a distance. Then her mother's stroke brings her home to a father who never called, a family business quietly drowning, and a silence in her parents' house that has been holding its breath for thirteen years. What was supposed to be a two-week visit becomes a season. A newspaper feature becomes a standing Tuesday appointment with an old woman, a pot of coffee, and a chess set that will not explain itself.

Nora does what journalists do. She documents. Eighteen photographs, two months, pencil arrows on a corkboard, and no pattern at all. Because the board does not make sense. Nothing in Gravier's Bend does. Not the hydrologist who repairs a canoe and stays in her line of sight. Not the job offer that arrives exactly when leaving would be easiest. Not her father, who loves his family the way limestone holds water: completely, invisibly, in the dark.This story is for you if you have ever: Prayed for your circumstances to change, and heard nothing, and wondered if anyone was listening. Loved a man who carries everything alone and calls it protection. Stood in the town, the marriage, the diagnosis, the job you did not choose, asking whether staying is faithfulness or failure. Looked back at the worst year of your life and noticed, long afterward, that something had been quietly arranged in it.

Then you already know how this book works. Our circumstances rarely change. But the internal work of the Holy Spirit changes us within those circumstances. That is this story: God's providence at work in those He calls His own, not in lightning, but in coffee made before you arrive, in a chair that fits, in a pattern you can only see by starting at the end and reading toward the beginning.A literary novel of quiet providenceSet among the limestone bluffs and spring-fed waters of the Missouri Ozarks, The Gravier Gambit is Christian fiction for readers who are tired of being preached at: no altar calls, no easy rescues, no tidy bows. Just a small town rendered with the patience of Wendell Berry, the wonder of Leif Enger, and the restraint of Kent Haruf, and a God who works the night shift.

It is a book for the man who does not read fiction, about the kind of man novels rarely bother to understand. It is a book for the woman who loves him. It is for anyone standing at the crossroads of duty and direction, suspecting that the two roads might, somewhere out of sight, be the same road.

The board is already arranged. The pieces are already moving.

Read it forward. Then read it again.

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