Uplifting, interconnected fables of rural life from 'America's foremost farmer-philosopher' (NPR)
As in thought he passes backward into time, the country becomes quieter, and it seems to grow larger. The sounds of engines become less frequent and farther apart until they cease altogether.
On a clear Kentucky night in 1888, a young woman risks her life to save a stranger from a drunken mob. Almost a hundred years later, her great-grandson Andy climbs a hill at the edge of town, and is flooded with memories of all he has lived, seen and heard of the past century of neighbourly feuds and family secrets; of grief and betrayal - and of great friendship that endures for a lifetime.
Wendell Berry unravels the story of a town over the course of four generations, lovingly chronicling the intertwined lives of the families who call it home. Affectionate, elegiac and wry, these uplifting rural fables invite us to witness the beauty and quiet heroism at the heart of each ordinary, interconnected life.
About the Author
'A farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts,' Wendell Berry is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays.
He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and also the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement, and the National Humanities Medal.
For more than forty years, he has lived and farmed in his native Henry Country, Kentucky, with his wife, Tanya, and their children and grandchildren.
Industry Reviews
A woven time-travelling book, about all that it is to be human, about love, land, life. Just beautiful. What an amazing writer he is. Short stories that link together like trees in a forest
-- Jackie Morris, co-author of The Lost Words
What a wise and inspiring collection this is, although 'collection' hardly does it justice, it sounds far too piecemeal and ephemeral for a book with such a meditative and singular focus. It's so full of life, expanding the horizon as you read, revealing a wider and a deeper way of looking at the quotidian. Like Denis Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, or Seamus Heaney, Wendell Berry shows us that sometimes looking deeply into one world can become a profound way of looking at the whole world.
-- Barney Norris, author of Five Rivers Met on A Wooded Plain
Praise for Wendell Berry: One of America's finest prose writers
* Publishers Weekly *
Berry richly evokes Port William's farmlands and hamlets, and his characters are fiercely individual, yet mutually protective in everything they do. . . . His sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world
* New York Times *
Intricate and beautiful, sad but strong
* Washington Post *
A small treasure . . . part of a long line that descends from Chaucer to Katherine Mansfield to William Trevor.
* Chicago Tribune *
