Late Harvest Green is the quiet, heartfelt story of life in a small town in Idaho over several generations of a farm family. It is an American story, a tale of open spaces, of men and women as rooted in the land, and as nourished by it, as the crops they grow. But war reaches them, and changes come, even in in their peaceful valley.
There is a deep love of history here, a love of life, and a profound compassion for the human condition. The past informs the present: what people remember, what they forget and forgive, how experience forms them. At the center of the book is the mystery of connection—how people form attachments, and how fragile these become in the face of loss or trauma, how some people thrive despite great loss, while others crumble under it. The characters are deeply and finely wrought. I felt as if I knew them as real people.
Like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Late Harvest Green conjures up a unique time and place. The unchanging mountains, the taste of a ripe peach, the scent and heft of the soil—all act as talismans to draw us deep into a vanished world whose riches are fleeting, and very real.
