Until the Names Grow Blurred

Edmund Ellicott is a collector of souls. He has lived too long. All his friends are dead—his enemies too. All but one. Until the Names Grow Blurred reads like a small epic, spanning the greater spaces of the twentieth century, through Edmund’s clouded memories. Son of a Spanish-American War hero, Edmund picks up his dead father’s Krag rifle and throws himself into the quagmire of World War I. “Being old takes up quite a bit of my time,” 92-year-old Edmund confesses. Thrown together with Katie, the strawberry-haired high school student, she works to pull his story from him in spite of his stubborn resistance. “Are you strong enough to handle this? I doubt it,” he says, for his secrets are both violent and shocking. He leaves behind the killing of the trenches, but they do not leave him. Nor do the deaths that come after. Before his wobbly remembrances give out completely, Edmund spills forth, to a resilient Katie, a broad landscape of suspicions, murder, women, and battle. Until the Names Grow Blurred is a gathering-up of one man’s broken shards of memory, from tiny Bullfork, Minnesota, to the knotted trenches of the Western Front, and back again. “I was not born old, girl—you’ll learn that soon enough.” A novel of twisted passions and severe loyalty, Until the Names Grow Blurred shines its penetrating light on both war and on war’s vanquisher, love.