
By: Ron Rindo
ISBN: 9781250375339
Publisher: St. Martin's PRess
Publication Date: 09/09/2025
Format: Hardcover
My Rating: TBR (ARC)
"With Life, and Death, and Giants, Ron Rindo has performed literary magic. This is a remarkable, profoundly moving novel."
—Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948
A young Amish woman, attended by the country veterinarian, delivers a baby that's eighteen pounds and twenty-seven inches long, and no one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of the boy. Raised by his brother in rural poverty, Gabriel Fisher walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and possesses extraordinary athletic abilities. When his older brother dies by suicide, Gabriel is taken in by devout Amish grandparents, who hide him away from the English world. At age seventeen, and nearly eight feet tall, Gabriel is spotted working in a hay field by the local football coach, and his life changes.
In Life, and Death, and Giants, Gabriel’s unique story is told by those whose lives are transformed by him: Doc Kennedy, the veterinarian who delivers him and becomes his mentor; Hannah Fisher, Gabriel's Amish grandmother, haunted by her daughter’s death and troubled by deep gaps in her faith; Billy Walton, the salty bar owner and bridge between the Amish and English communities in Lakota; and Trey Beathard, the football coach, who tries to mentor Gabriel as his fame spreads throughout the world.
Threaded with the poems of Emily Dickinson, Life, and Death, and Giants weaves together an unforgettable story of faith, family, buried secrets, and everyday miracles.
Praise
"Straddling the Wisconsin of the Amish and “English,” Life, and Death, and Giants assays the limitations and temptations of the godly and the worldly. Ron Rindo has fashioned a small-town novel as magical and moral as a tall tale."
— Stewart O’Nan, author of Snow Angels and Songs for the Missing
"With Life, and Death, and Giants, Ron Rindo has performed literary magic. This is a remarkable, profoundly moving novel."
—Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948
"Like all the best tall-tales, legends, and folk stories, the size and skill of the hero matters to the narrative. But what matters more is the hero’s heart, and their willingness to sacrifice for a greater good to show their community and indeed, their country, what is possible, what is virtuous, what is best. The big beating heart of this novel is Gabriel Fisher, a 21st Century Paul Bunyan. But even more than Fisher is the book’s writer, Ron Rindo, who has crafted a novel that is remarkably generous, kind, and graceful. This is a novel that still believes in magic, goodness, and everyday heroes."
—Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and A Forty Year Kiss
"Ron Rindo’s deeply attentive and broadly generous novel, Life, and Death, and Giants, makes the sturdiest of stools out of its title’s three legs as it examines what happens when the mysterious interrupts the certainties we all cling to. Rindo reminds us, through his careful and loving prose, that the mysterious and the certain are always partnered, and if we choose to, if we pay close enough attention to ourselves and the worlds around us, and if we share the news of what we see, we may build our own sturdy stools, and step up, and discover the giant in us all." -
—Karen Shepard, author of Kiss Me Someone and The Celestials
About the Author
RON RINDO is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. He has published one previous novel, Breathing Lake Superior, and three short story collections. He lives in Pickett, Wisconsin. WEBSITE