From National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and Flannery O'Connor Award winner Melinda Moustakis, a debut novel set in 1950s Alaska, about the turbulent marriage of two unlikely homesteaders
Anchorage, 1956. When Marie and Lawrence first lock eyes at the Moose Lodge, they are immediately drawn together. But when they decide to marry, days later, they are more in love with the promise of homesteading than anything. For Lawrence, his parcel of 150 acres is an opportunity to finally belong in a world that has never delivered on its promise. For Marie, the land is an escape from the empty future she sees spinning out before her, and a risky bet is better than none at all. But over the next few years, as they work the land in an attempt to secure a deed to their homestead, they must face everything they don't know about each other. As the Territory of Alaska moves toward statehood and inexorable change, can Marie and Lawrence create something new, or will they break apart trying?
Immersive and wild-hearted, joyfully alive to both the intimate and the elemental, Homestead is an unflinching portrait of a new state and of the hard-fought, hard-bitten work of making a family.
Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket
Pages: 272 pages
ISBN-10: 1250845556
Item Weight: 1.0 lbs
Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.0 x 9.6 inches
Customer Reviews: 3 out of 5 stars 1,001 to 10,000 ratings
Praise for Melinda Moustakis: "Moustakis has oceans of talent….Her prose is full of the same deep beauty, the same ancient rhythms and cadences of the big spaces she is describing: mountain, glacier, river and sky." --Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness "Thrilling…A writer who truly has everything--clean and radiant prose; unforgettable characters; formal designs for story after story that are innovative yet utterly readable." --Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award winning author of Lord of Misrule "Every so often--make that all too rarely--a work of fiction that is rooted in place appears in which the very language-natural and elemental--seems as much a feature of the terroir as the weather, soil, trees, rivers…Moustakis has written such a book." --Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago "Immediately I was lost in the hard poetry of the sentences, lost in the wilds of Alaska, lost under the whiskey spell of a writer who knows how to wield a knife, a rifle, a fishing reel as well as she does her sharply honed language. I am completely in love with the stories of Moustakis." --Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding
Melinda Moustakis was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and grew up in California. Her story collection, Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, won the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Maurice Prize, and was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 selection. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Alaska Quarterly Review, Granta, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has been awarded an O. Henry Prize. She is the recipient of the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the NEA Literature Fellowship, the Kenyon Review Fellowship, and the Rona Jaffe Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Homestead is her debut novel.
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