From the author of A Pint of Plain and Traveling Light. “In his first novel, Bill Barich delivers a seasoned performance” (The New York Times Book Review).
From one of California’s most celebrated writers comes a generous and deeply absorbing novel, as filled with warmth and the hope of second chances as the land it describes.
Returning from New York to the vineyards of Northern California to be with her dying mother, Anna Torelli never expects that the trip will change her life. But when she meets Arthur Atwater, her father’s vineyard manager—a man as emotionally bruised and as fiercely independent as she is—Anna is pulled back into the rhythms of the growing season, into the radiant landscape of her childhood, and into a love affair that rouses her as nothing has before. Carson Valley is also home to Anna’s aging father, Victor, the son of Italian immigrants who first planted the vineyard in the 1890s, and his foreman, Antonio Lopez, a Mexican immigrant whose marital troubles deepen when his cousin Omar Perez crosses the border illegally to work the vineyard harvest.
Carson Valley is a masterful work of social realism—as insightful about modern love as it is about rural life in the grip of change.
“Bill Barich writes with superb intelligence, with sympathy and unusual grace.” —Richard Ford, New York Times–bestselling author
“Barich marvelously captures the elemental life of the vineyard . . . [He] sets every human endeavor, all emotion and loving and fear, against the implacable rhythms of the soil.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A quietly but genuinely remarkable debut.” —Kirkus Reviews
