The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind

Like his PEN/Faulkner Award -- winning novel Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson's beautifully observed and emotionally piercing short stories are set largely in the Pacific Northwest. In those vast landscapes, hunting, fishing, and sports are the givens of men's lives. But although Guterson's characters go into the wilderness in search of mallards or silver trout, they discover other things instead: the decay of their youthful ardor; the motiveless cruelty of strangers; their own capacity for deception and grief. Generously imagined, masterfully restrained, and written in prose that stings like the scent of gunpowder, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind is a collection of extraordinary power. Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, is also available from Random House AudioBooks.

Literature & Fiction

GUTERSON, David

United States

Harper&Row

Snow Falling On Cedars

A “finely wrought, flawlessly written” novel (New York Times Book Review), set on a small island in the Puget Sound, that is “at various moments a courtroom drama, an interracial love story, and a war chronicle” (San Francisco Chronicle). “Guterson has fashioned something haunting and true” (Pico Iyer, Time). Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award. A fall 1999 major motion picture.

Snow Falling on Cedars

Harcourt, Brace, & Company

It is mid-October, 1997, harvest time in the Columbia Basin of central Washington state, a rich apple- and pear-growing region. Ben Givens, recently widowed, is a retired heart surgeon, once admired for his steadiness of hand, his precision, his endurance. He has terminal colon cancer. While Ben does not readily accept defeat, he is determined to avoid suffering rather than engage it. And so, accompanied by his two hunting dogs, he sets out through the mythic American West-sage deserts, yawning canyons, dusty ranches, vast orchards-on his last hunt. The main issues for Ben as a doctor had been tactical and so it would be with his death. But he hadn't considered the persuasiveness of memory-the promise he made to his wife Rachel, the love of his life, during World War II. Or life's mystery. On his journey he meets a young couple who are "forever," a drifter offering left-handed advice that might lessen the pain, a veterinarian with a touch only a heart surgeon would recognize, a rancher bent on destruction, a migrant worker who tests Ben's ability to understand. And just when he thinks there is no turning back, nothing to lose that wasn't lost, his power of intervention is called upon and his very identity tested. Full of humanity, passion, and moral honesty, East of the Mountains is a bold and beautiful novel of personal discovery.

East of the Mountains

A Japanese-American fisherman's 1954 murder trial becomes the backdrop of a story that follows a doomed love affair between a white boy and a Japanese girl, a simmering land dispute, and the wartime internment of San Piedro's Japanese residents. Movie tie-in. 75,000 first printing.

Snow Falling on Cedars: Movie Tie-in Edition

Contemporary

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS.

Literary

Harcourt Brace & Co. (1999)

Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

A high school English teacher tells why he has chosen to educate his own sons at home, offering information on the academic success of home-schooled children, the meaning of education, the psychology of learning, and education in other societies.

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Harcourt

Ben Givens is a retired heart surgeon who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Deciding to take charge of his own demise, Ben travels into the wild country of Washington state with his two dogs and his father's Winchester, to hunt one last time and then to end his life on his own terms. But, as with all quests, the Fates intervene. A car wreck introduces him to various helpers and hindrances, and gradually Ben undertakes a journey back through his own past. As he nears the apple-growing country in which he grew up, he recalls the signal events of his youth and manhood-especially his wartime experiences and his profound love for his wife of fifty years. Ben is transformed into an American Odysseus as he confronts the many sides of his own nature in a novel that radiates with the glories of the natural world and the mysterious permutations of the human heart.

Harvest Books

In an honest, perceptive discussion of children and education by the bestselling author of Snow Falling on Cedars, Guterson answers questions about homeschooling but also reflects on broader issues, such as family life, individual fulfillment, and community.

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Harvest

The Other

From the author of the best-selling Snow Falling on Cedars, a dazzling new novel about youth and idealism, adulthood and its compromises, and two powerfully different visions of what it means to live a good life. John William Barry has inherited the pedigree—and wealth—of two of Seattle’s elite families; Neil Countryman is blue-collar Irish. Nevertheless, when the two boys meet in 1972 at age sixteen, they’re brought together by what they have in common: a fierce intensity and a love of the outdoors that takes them, together and often, into Washington’s remote backcountry, where they must rely on their wits—and each other—to survive. Soon after graduating from college, Neil sets out on a path that will lead him toward a life as a devoted schoolteacher and family man. But John William makes a radically different choice, dropping out of college and moving deep into the woods, convinced that it is the only way to live without hypocrisy. When John William enlists Neil to help him disappear completely, Neil finds himself drawn into a web of secrets and often agonizing responsibility, deceit, and tragedy—one that will finally break open with a wholly unexpected, life-altering revelation. Riveting, deeply humane, The Other is David Guterson’s most brilliant and provocative novel to date.

KNOPF

A sweeping, propulsive, darkly humorous new novel by the best-selling author of Snow Falling on Cedars: a story of destiny, desire, and destruction that reimagines Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex for our own era. In Seattle in 1962, Walter Cousins, a mild-mannered actuary—“a guy who weighs risk for a living”—takes a risk of his own, and makes the biggest error of his life. He sleeps with Diane Burroughs, the sexy, not-quite-legal British au pair who’s taking care of his children for the summer. Diane gets pregnant and leaves their baby on a doorstep, but not before turning the tables on Walter and setting in motion a tragedy of epic proportions. Their orphaned child, adopted by an adoring family and named Edward Aaron King, grows up to become a billionaire Internet tycoon and an international celebrity—the “King of Search”—who unknowingly, but inexorably, hurtles through life toward a fate he may have no power to shape. An instant classic—David Guterson’s most daring and dazzling novel yet—that brings a contemporary urgency to one of the greatest stories of all time.

Ed King

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

Books by GUTERSON, David

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

The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind

Snow Falling on Cedars

East of the Mountains

Snow Falling on Cedars: Movie Tie-in Edition

EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS.

Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

East of the Mountains

Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

The Other

Ed King