Garner - Softcover

Allio, Kirstin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566891752 ISBN 13: 9781566891752

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2005

Synopsis

“An elegant, luminous, moving work of lyric prose. Every page shimmers.”—Carole Maso

“Fiercely imagined, alive with incandescent imagery, Kirstin Allio’s Garner is a memorable debut.”—John Burnham Schwartz

Landlocked, sail-shaped Garner, New Hampshire, is a town delineated by its Puritan ethics and its “Live Free or Die” mentality. Like the forbidding landscape of Wharton’s Ethan Frome, this New England outpost keeps its secrets and shapes its inhabitants. Frances Giddens, a spirited, elusive girl born at the dawn of the twentieth century and now approaching womanhood, moves through the forests and rivers that mark Garner’s borders as easily as she befriends its stoic residents.

In the summer of 1925, with Garner’s economic prospects in decline, a group of wealthy New Yorkers descends on the Giddens farm for summer leisure. Even as Frances is drawn to the romance the newcomers represent, darker forces are unleashed. When her body is found in rain-swollen Blood Brook, this deeply private community begins to unravel.

Garner chronicles the mystery of Frances’ sudden death and the demise of a picture-perfect New England town threatened by a new century. Allio’s beautiful, atmospheric prose reveals the town’s hidden history and the fierce longings locked in the hearts of its citizens. “Bounded by her trees was the new England,” muses the postman and local historian. “It is said that if one had the gossamer soul of an angel and wings of an artist’s weave, one might pass from Maine to Rhode Island, crown to green crown, and o’er New Hampshire . . . Tree to tree, one might travel . . .” But some may never leave.

Kirstin Allio has taught creative writing at Brown University and holds degrees from Brown and New York University. Born in Maine, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband and sons. This is her first novel.

About this title

About the Author:

A former creative writing instructor at Brown University, Kirstin Allio holds degrees from both Brown and New York University. Born in Maine, she now lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband and two children. This is her first novel.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. With his ears made of envelopes," postman Willard Heald hears the secret intimacies of the residents of Garner, N.H., the setting of this exceptional debut. He composes intricate histories of his small town—time lines, lists, aphorisms, ordinances, predictions and conversations—which form the skeleton of Allio's lyrical evocation of country life as its adherence to the past smothers its present. In a novel full of voices, Heald's rings the loudest: "For some of our native folk, to meet the modern age was a difficult task. It was I who came upon young Frances, face up in Blood Brook and floating." This discovery occurs at the end of summer 1925, during Garner's transition from a prosperous farming town to a decaying vacation destination for a group of wealthy urbanites, and the death of nymphlike Frances only hastens the metamorphosis. Allio's finely wrought writing—Frances has "a laugh of leaves," while Heald's wife muses that "the evening was what one married for"—just barely overshadows a narrative that turns suspenseful in its final third. Four main characters nurse hearts as brittle as autumn's foliage, and their hurts lead them to places as frightening as dark forests and as shocking as the cool water of a stream. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1566891752
• ISBN 13: 9781566891752
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232