A BOOK OF DAYS is the story of a book, The Journal of Thomas Keating-the days when it was written, and the subsequent days when it changed the lives of those who touched it. We first see the book as a plaything for two children on a Western Pennsylvania iron plantation in the early 1800s, who use the ancient language of the book in their games of sexual awakening. We see the book in the same location in 1776, when a young woman brings the book written in Gaelic to a survivor of a massacre that occurred here, to help her understand the fate of her mother. And we see, at the heart of the novel, the writer of the book, an ensign of the Black Watch, as he seeks refuge in a blockhouse he fears is surrounded by Indians, recounting his journey upriver with a band of misfits to discover the fate of the outpost's lost command.

A Book of Days (Books of Furnass)

Literature & Fiction

Snodgrass, Richard

Literary

Snodgrass Industries, Inc

In the working class dialect of Western Pennsylvania around Pittsburgh, the phrase redd up means to put in order, to tidy or make neat, such as after dinner we helped redd up the table. In the stories of Redding Up, the final volume of the critically acclaimed Books of Furnass, we see characters from other books of the series about the fictitious mill town of Furnass seeking closure or meaning from earlier events as they continue to live their lives. A successful businesswoman returns to her hometown to tie up some loose ends, dealing with a recalcitrant uncle and the living arrangements of her father's mistress. A Black homicide detective comes to Furnass to learn something of the life of a man he killed twenty-three years earlier. A grandmother makes contact with a retired minister wanting him to admit his presence at an outrage that happened to her when they were growing up. The daughter of one of the town's founding families returns to clean out the family home and finds more than she expected in the cluttered basement. A local hero finds himself fleeing his past even as he pursues it through his daily rounds, watched over by the glowing red eye of a great winged dragon. Or not. In counterpoint to these stories of a mill town struggling to survive without a mill, there are portfolios of photographs taken by the author of the region in the mid-seventies when there was steel with the mills and valley towns flourishing. The book concludes with a Coda, which could serve as a Coda for the entire Books of Furnass series, an origin story of the time before there was a town here when a chief of the fictional Onagona Indians has to choose between expediency and survival when confronted with the spiritual.

Redding Up: More Stories of Furnass (Books of Furnass)

Snodgrass, Richard Bruce

It's 1914, and the Lyle family, like the United States itself, is at a crossroads. Malcolm Lyle, all too aware that he is no engineering genius like his father who founded the company, has made the Keystone Steam Works internationally known through his abilities in marketing and adapting his father's ideas. Now he must decide whether to devote the company's resources to a lucrative government war project, or to back his son, Augustus, who is an even worse engineer than Malcolm, in the development of the ill-fated steam-powered Lylemobile. Meanwhile, he learns that his youngest son, John Lincoln, has gone off unannounced to join a multinational effort to fight the Kaiser's invasion of Europe, at the same time that the boy's unmarried twin sister, Mary Lydia, turns out to be pregnant. Malcolm's wife, Missy, is no help with his dilemmas, content to spend her days dressed in peignoirs and lying around on the living room sofa reading women's magazines and eating bonbons. His eighty-nine-year-old Mother, Libby, the steely matriarch of the Lyle clan, watches Malcolm's every move with what he believes is an unapproving eye. Then there is Libby's Caribbean maid, Perpetual, an impenetrable figure with a room full of medicinal plants and an indelible, irrepressible spirit, who has inadvertently become the axis around whom the Lyle household revolves.

All That Will Remain (Books of Furnass)

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Books by Snodgrass Industries, Inc

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A Book of Days (Books of Furnass)

Redding Up: More Stories of Furnass (Books of Furnass)

All That Will Remain (Books of Furnass)