At a glance
A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont)—a “witty and gorgeous” (The Guardian) novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods.
Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.
But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, a great capacity “to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.
The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.
Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
Don’t just take
our word for it
“Charming . . . a prescription for summer amusement that takes immediate effect. . . . lovely if occasionally confounding company, like going in and out of a thick mist. . . . the prose of Country People flows like a babbling brook . . . There’s so much fine, freewheeling observation and pillowy erudition here, it’s tempting just to sink in.”
- The New York Times
“The surface structures in Country People may be sugar-spun, but the novel’s foundations are solid, and its roots—the tangled and interconnected web of stories that gave rise to its new stories—are deliciously deep. The esoteric is counterbalanced by the mundane; family life is judged as worthy of investigation as underground caverns; and the whole thing is delivered in prose so witty and gorgeous that it calls to mind Nabokov’s comic masterpiece Pnin, surely another of the book’s literary antecedents. This is, put simply, a joyful book—and the deeper you dig, the more joyful it becomes.”
- The Guardian
“Satirical but big-hearted and empathetic. . . . Mason is a lively, fluid writer; here he glides smoothly between present and past, myth and everyday detail, skepticism and credulity. He has fun with his characters without making fun of them. . . . It is simply put, very funny. . . . Reading Country People in public I kept having to muffle my LOLs. That’s never a bad sign. The affection that Mason clearly feels for Miles and his brood is infectious.”
- The Boston Globe
