Kent Haruf's last novel

In the small Colorado town where they live, with gossips behind every curtain and café counter, this could be a shocking proposition, but Louis's reaction is not concerned with morality but with practicality: "When would you want to start?" he asks. "What if I snore?"

Haruf presents two elderly people making a brave and unusual domestic arrangement, and this is a theme which colours his most famous novels, The Plainsong Trilogy, all of which are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado. Beneath the town's all-American surface exists the unorthodox: families shatter, mothers flee, fathers vanish and children are fostered. Yet, new family units are formed. Two old men offer a home to a young single mother; a girl who lost her mother finds herself informally adopted by the town's childless women; a man commits suicide and his struggling family are taken care of by the man who prompted his demise; a depressed woman abandons her sons to try to recover her sense of self, and tries again to be a mother from her distant apartment in the city.

Our Souls At Night continues this theme of the unconventional domestic by showing a couple of lonely people forming a new family unit when society would have labelled them as redundant old folk. Their new way of living is bolstered when Addie's young grandson, Jamie, comes to stay. "It's a hopeful thing, isn't it?" she says.

But Haruf has never been a sentimental writer, either in subject or in style. His writing is stripped of ornate, soft language and his characters are allocated a similar harsh treatment, for Holt is not a town of whimsy and dreams. Addie and Louis's late happiness is scorned and resented: old men make sly remarks in the coffee shop and there is innuendo from the woman behind the grocery store checkout. The worst hostility, however, comes not from the small-minded townsfolk, but from Addie and Louis's grown children, both of whom have long since abandoned Holt for lives in the big city of Denver.

"People meeting in the dark like you do," says Holly, Louis's daughter, appalled at the news her father is sharing a bed with another woman. "It just seems embarrassing." The children descend on Holt, judgemental and affronted, chiding their parents for their reckless behaviour, speaking to them as though they were sneaky teenagers. Yet Haruf never allows Addie and Louis to be perceived as such by the reader; we know their meetings are chaste and tender - "It's some kind of decision to be free. Even at our ages" - and so the children simply appear petty and constricted. Despite their having fled the small town, Haruf suggests it takes more than a new postcode to forge independence of mind.

The adults from the big city are shown as the stunted ones, still mired in small-town morality. Whereas, Addie and Louis, staying in Holt, the worn landscape in which they're comfortable, have found the confidence and resolve to live life as they wish. Perhaps this was because they were never hobbled by having to make their way in Denver, grappling for identity and status in the cruel swirl of an anonymous city. Haruf suggests the struggle has sapped something from these children, stranding them in a perpetually finicky adolescence, and so they return home to inflict resentments and insecurities on their quietly happy parents.

For Louis suggests adulthood is indeed constricting. As the couple lie in bed, bringing forth their life stories and memories in place of sex, he says, "I failed my spirit or something. I missed some kind of call to be something more than a mediocre English teacher in a little dirt-blown town." Haruf shows that it's in old age that such revelations come, but that's also when the chance for wisdom and renewal presents itself. That's what makes this novel so moving and melancholy: it's a late call for action and understanding, made especially poignant as it was written from the author's deathbed.