Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur’s formidable debut give voice to the dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters—adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home—golden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes rouse the imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul.
In “Creek Dippers,” a teenage girl vows to escape the fate that has trapped her eccentric mother. In “God’s Country,” an elderly woman is unexpectedly reminded of a forbidden youthful passion and the chance she did not take. Returning to her childhood house when her mother falls ill, a daughter grapples with her own sense of belonging in “The Women Where I’m From.”
With striking prose powerful in its clarity and purity, MacArthur effortlessly renders characters—men and women, young and old—cleaved to the fierce and beautiful land that has defined them.
Winner of the 2016 PEN/NewEngland Award for fiction.
Finalist for the New England Book Award. Finalist of the Vermont Book Award. Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers selection. Independent Bookseller's Indie Next selection.
Reviews -
“MacArthur is able to render complicated situations precisely and depict tenderness and harshness with an equally deft hand.” - Publishers Weekly
“MacArthur’s multilayered tales involve heady internalization as characters push beyond their preoccupations to inch toward resolution.” - Booklist
“Each powerful story in this collection becomes part of a fearsome whole, one that celebrates the ways in which memory itself is half wild.” - Ploughshares
In “Creek Dippers,” a teenage girl vows to escape the fate that has trapped her eccentric mother. In “God’s Country,” an elderly woman is unexpectedly reminded of a forbidden youthful passion and the chance she did not take. Returning to her childhood house when her mother falls ill, a daughter grapples with her own sense of belonging in “The Women Where I’m From.”
With striking prose powerful in its clarity and purity, MacArthur effortlessly renders characters—men and women, young and old—cleaved to the fierce and beautiful land that has defined them.
Winner of the 2016 PEN/NewEngland Award for fiction.
Finalist for the New England Book Award. Finalist of the Vermont Book Award. Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers selection. Independent Bookseller's Indie Next selection.
Reviews -
“MacArthur is able to render complicated situations precisely and depict tenderness and harshness with an equally deft hand.” - Publishers Weekly
“MacArthur’s multilayered tales involve heady internalization as characters push beyond their preoccupations to inch toward resolution.” - Booklist
“Each powerful story in this collection becomes part of a fearsome whole, one that celebrates the ways in which memory itself is half wild.” - Ploughshares