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Always Coming Home - Paperback
$22.49
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Always Coming Home
$22.49
Returns: if a book arrives damaged or isn't the one you ordered, email us within 7 days of delivery and we'll replace it or refund you, usually with nothing to send back. Refund policy
Is this book for you?
- Feels
- Thoughtful, Atmospheric, Hopeful
- Kind of story
- Literary science fiction, Post-apocalyptic
- About
- Nature, Identity, War
- Pace
- Slow burn
- How dark
- 2 of 5. A little dark
- Romance
- None to speak of
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Featured in our reading guide: Where to Start with Ursula K. Le Guin
Not quite a novel. It's an archaeology of a people who haven't existed yet.
Shelf note: Not a book to rush. Dip in and out, and let the Valley become a place you visit.
The Kesh live in the Valley of the Na, in a far-future Northern California, long after the civilization that poisoned the land has gone. Le Guin presents them the way an anthropologist might present a culture recovered from fragments: a partial life story here, then poems, recipes, maps, glossaries, funeral rites, drama, a note on their alphabet, an argument about their economy.
The narrative spine is Stone Telling, a woman born to a Kesh mother and a father from the Condor people, a militarized, patriarchal society to the north. Her journey there and back is the book's beating heart, and it works because Le Guin has already made the Valley so thoroughly real that leaving it hurts.
She considered this her most ambitious book. It's a sustained argument that a functioning society is worth imagining in detail, down to what they sing at harvest. It's one of her most radical novels, and a study in what it means to belong somewhere.
Details
- Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
- Introduction: Shruti Swamy
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 9780358726920
Praise
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With high invention and deep intelligence, Always Coming Home presents, in alternating narratives, poems and expositions, Ursula K. Le Guin's most consistently lyric and luminous book in a career adorned with some of the most precise and passionate prose in the service of a major imaginative vision.
New York Times
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One of [Le Guin's] most radical novels... Always Coming Home is a study in what a complete and utter rejection of capitalism and patriarchy might look like, for society and for the art of storytelling.
The Millions
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One of Le Guin's most fascinating and underrated works: a sprawling exploration of a fictional people known as the Kesh, who lived in northern California hundreds of years in the future... A novel, a scrapbook and an imaginary anthropological study in one...
The Guardian
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A gift to the reader, a gentle and wise book that is her most personal, her most daring, probably her best yet.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
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