Giant’s Harp

The Giant’s Harp is a fantasy of myth, marble, and memory — a coming-of-age tale that begins on the windswept cliffs of Ist and unfolds across deserts of bone, Eagle Malls, Stone Libraries, and the long northwest aisle of the world. Written between 1984 and 1996 on Robert Hunter’s old Osborne computer, it is at once a hero’s journey, a meditation on lineage and inheritance, and a lyrical puzzle-box of riddles, ballads, and equinoctial omens.

Readers of the Grateful Dead’s songbook will recognize the country. The terrapin who carries this volume’s sigil first appeared on the cover of Terrapin Station (1977), the album-length suite Hunter wrote with Jerry Garcia — itself a piece about a storyteller, a sailor, and a soldier, drawn toward a place that exists more in song than on any map. The novel inhabits the same imaginative weather: ballads sung in minor mode, sealed instructions, fiddle-playing terrapins, and a long road taken on faith.

Hunter finished the book in the autumn of 1996, weeks after Garcia’s death, and dedicated it “in memory of JJG.” In a real sense it is the prose companion to a forty-year conversation between two old friends — a stone Stone Library with its arms in the clouds, raised in a lyricist’s hand to a guitarist who could no longer hear it.

Twenty-one chapters and an epilogue carry the reader from the first whispers of Ist to the final blood of thunder — and to a quiet inheritance beyond it.

• ElmoA young Schul setting out from the cliff-villages of Ist on his first descent into the wider world.
• The SchulaA keeper of ballads on the shore, whose songs do not pause for politeness.
• Wolf O' The WildA wanderer met along the road; equal parts companion and warning.
• The Jabajaba of NikabaA figure of rumor and ritual, central to one of the novel's strangest passages.
• The Cat's EyeAn object — and a watcher — that recurs across the journey.
• The Hand of SoA power named more often than seen, whose mark is felt in the later chapters.

And many more — bards, wolves, riddlers, and wind — whom the reader meets in their proper chapter.