Description

‘A woven time-travelling book, about love, land, life … Short stories that link together like trees in a forest’ Jackie Morris

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 farmers wooing schoolteachers and soldiers trudging home from war; of the first motor car, the Great Depression and Vietnam; of neighbourly feuds and family secrets; of grief and betrayal – and of great friendship that endures for a lifetime.

These are Wendell Berry’s tales of Port William, a little farming community nestled deep in the Kentucky River valley. They unravel 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.

Publisher Review

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 * Berry is the master of earthy country living seen through the eyes of laconic farmers.... He makes his stories shine with meaning and warmth * Christian Science Monitor * What unites [these stories] is a deep humanity, compassion and a sense of recognition that our modern lives unfolded at some point on Earth from stories such as these * Seattle Times * No writer has written of a place better or more completely than Wendell Berry has written of Port William * Arkansas Democrat Gazette * Berry is an American treasure; this collection belongs in all literary fiction collections * Library Journal *