Daniel Mason for Country People
Thursday 17th September, 7pm
Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath, York Street, Bath, Somerset BA1 1NG
6.30pm
7pm
This autumn, we are delighted to welcome award-winning novelist Daniel Mason back to the bookshop to celebrate his forthcoming book, Country People.
'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
'Full of joy - and exactly the kind of reading experience we could all do with right now. The book of the summer' Mick Herron
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 the 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'. Soon he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales - from a ghostly tree surgeon, to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress, and a photographer of snowflakes - until at last he stumbles upon a bizarre local legend, which, he begins to suspect, might not be a legend at all.
Daniel Mason is a doctor and author of The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, The Winter Soldier, and (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.