Fiction. The Andersons are a hardtack sort, built from gravel and loam and the echoes of Brigham Young's voice shot out from the canyons. But the sermons do not land clearly. Instead we watch as Karin vacillates between intellectual and pioneer woman, Latter-day Saint and woman veering toward outer darkness. She marries and starts a family. With her husband growing more and more distant, even perversely hostile, they tumble together, wits against arms, for a better foothold at the base of the Wasatch Range.

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Anderson, Karin

Literature & Fiction

Fiddleblack ltd

"This masterwork flouts expectations." —FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review "This resonant novel is told in a multitude of voices, forming a family saga that is both a revisionist history of Latter–day Saint settlement in the American West and a personal journey. In powerful prose, Anderson lets a chorus of voices tell their own often surprising, sometimes heartbreaking stories." —KIRKUS "Anderson's fictionalized journey through time was prompted by her mother’s declining health, her son’s hospitalization, rampant wildfires plaguing the region, and a beloved country severely divided. A work of universal appeal." —LIBRARY JOURNAL, starred review "…bravely wrestles abandoned and underrepresented histories onto the page… a veritable index of abandoned history, almost like the second telling of what should have been included with the first." —15 BYTES "Anderson explores the thorny entanglements of family, religion, and self, asking—with crisp, evocative prose—what portion of our lives do we direct, and what portion rests upon the 'dark hazards' of ancestral preordination?" —JANA RICHMAN, author of Finding Stillness in a Noisy World and The Ordinary Truth "Anderson is a ventriloquist, channeling the voices of a multitude of spokespersons whose DNA, defiances, differences, and determinations magnetize them to the American West. This glorious chorus is by turns poetic, rural, conversational, formal, an aria of stories united by their common descendant. Literary and true, this is the hardest—and best—kind of book, taking no prisoners, forgiving nothing, demanding all. Read it to confirm your membership, fierce and fragile, in the great imperfect human race." —JULIE NICHOLS, author of Pigs When They Straddle the Air "A magnificent orchestra of voices—piercing and holy, naked and singing, ragged and wistful and queer—but each voice, in turn, fiercely intimate and finely wrought. …a book for readers who refuse to be lulled or placated, who demand more heart, more exploration, more character. Within these pages, apostates are pardoned, saints brutally humanized, and whole families baptized by their blindness. From sentence to sentence, Anderson reminds us that language is landscape, history a shapeshifter, and all humanity, in its need for connection, in its raw clawing for meaning, is that lone cry from the wilderness." —NATE LIEDERBACH, author of Beasts You’ll Never See "Voices from the American West as idiosyncratic as the Southern voices that make up Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The book's revelations and mysteries illuminate our own sketchy histories, the true stories we construct that are anything but whole but that help us survive. We all live in the Land of Dreams, which is to say in the land of our own and our ancestors' stories." —SCOTT ABBOTT, author of Wild Rides and Wildflowers "A lyrical narrative of history, home, family, religion, land, and identity. Through language rich in metaphor, that is as rhythmic and melodic as a poem, Anderson reveals to her readers that family is more than genetics, home is more than place, and understanding is always fragmented. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams will find a solid place in the canon of literature of the American West." —LAURA HAMBLIN, author of The Eyes of a Flounder "Anderson's keen prose shreds the myths of American history…you will find, in Anderson's vision, a stark and truthful reckoning with white legacies." —MICHAEL WALSH, author of The Dirt Riddles Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened Utah mother traveling an evocative route through the sites of her arid Western ancestry. As her narration fades, the dead speak their stories: a ragged Mormon boy; a hoarder’s queer son; descendants of British squatters. They give no answers, but conjure vivid moments set in iconic—and diminishing—American places.

Before Us Like a Land of Dreams

United States

Torrey House Press

Cassandra Soelberg, pregnant at seventeen, was cast out by Mormon patriarchs of her community. Returning to her rural Utah hometown after forty years to care for her senile mother, she meets a young man with an uncanny resemblance to the father of her never-known child. Drawn back into traumatic scenes of young adulthood, she must reconcile with her past in the fiercely beautiful landscapes that shaped her. What Falls Away is a powerful and compassionate novel of family, art, and the raw process of healing.

What Falls Away

Literary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Anderson, Karin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Anderson, Karin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Anderson, Karin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

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Before Us Like a Land of Dreams

What Falls Away