West of Here
By Jonathan Evison
(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Hardcover, 9781565129528, 486pp.)
Publication Date: February 2011
Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover, Paperback, Compact Disc, Paperback, Paperback
Categories: Historical - General
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Selected by Indie Booksellers for the February 2011 Indie Next List“I loved this big, gorgeous novel in which characters and story lines flow, merge, and diverge like the streams and channels of a river. The story spans more than 100 years in the fictional town of Port Bonita, Washington, and its surrounding wilderness. Evison pulls together such grand themes as our relationship to the land, what we make of our past, and what we owe the future. His writing style is unpretentious and delightful, a combination of big ideas and down-to-earth, friendly delivery that's perfectly suited to this quintessentially American novel.”
-- Christie Olson Day, Gallery Bookshop &, Mendocino, CA
Description
Set in the fictional town of Port Bonita, on Washington State 's rugged Pacific coast, "West of Here" is propelled by a story that both re-creates and celebrates the American experience it is storytelling on the grandest scale. With one segment of the narrative focused on the town 's founders circa 1890 and another showing the lives of their descendants in 2006, the novel develops as a kind of conversation between two epochs, one rushing blindly toward the future and the other struggling to undo the damage of the past.
An exposition on the effects of time, on how something said or done in one generation keeps echoing through all the years that follow, and how mistakes keep happening and people keep on trying to be strong and brave and, most important, just and right, "West of Here" harks back to the work of such masters of Americana as Bret Harte, Edna Ferber, and Larry McMurtry, writers whose fiction turned history into myth and myth into a nation 's shared experience. It is a bold novel by a writer destined to become a major force in American literature.
An exposition on the effects of time, on how something said or done in one generation keeps echoing through all the years that follow, and how mistakes keep happening and people keep on trying to be strong and brave and, most important, just and right, "West of Here" harks back to the work of such masters of Americana as Bret Harte, Edna Ferber, and Larry McMurtry, writers whose fiction turned history into myth and myth into a nation 's shared experience. It is a bold novel by a writer destined to become a major force in American literature.
Saturday, Jun 25, 2011
NPR's Lynn Neary taps three book critics â?? Laura Miller, Ron Charles and Rigoberto Gonzalez â?? to get their picks for the best summer reading. More at NPR.org
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