Country People by Daniel Mason

‘Told with warmth and wit, Mason’s prose shimmers in this immersive ode to stories, to the land, and its people’ Lucy Steeds, author of The Artist

‘A charming, funny, exhilarating Vermont adventure’ Clare Fuller, author of Swimming Lessons

‘Full of joy – and exactly the kind of reading experience we could all do with right now. The book of the summer’ Mick Herron, author of Slow Horses

A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown-a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America’s greatest living writers

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales, and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, who possesses, in Kate’s words, ‘a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere.’ And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in a “Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre – even ridiculous – local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

From the author of NORTH WOODS, a joyous new novel about marriage, family, friendship, storytelling, and how people find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

About the Author: Daniel Mason is a doctor and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His work has been translated into 28 languages, adapted for opera and the stage, and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His short stories and essays have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize. He is an assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry. He currently lives in Palo Alto, CA.

07 Jul 2026
 

Country People by Daniel Mason ISBN 9781399835022