All the Living
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- 5,49 €
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- 5,49 €
Publisher Description
A first novel by the most significant new American writer to have emerged in years.
Aloma is a young woman who has put her life aside – and her dreams of becoming a pianist – to move in with her lover, Orren. His family has recently been killed in an accident. Stricken with grief and overwhelmingly burdened by the shape his life has taken, Orren is desperate to keep the tobacco farm running. There is a drought, and he needs it to rain.
As he toils with the land, Aloma finds that Orren has become more remote than she could ever have imagined, and that silence has taken hold of their relationship. When she begins to play the piano for the local church, she meets the local preacher, and feels a dangerous attraction for him.
As events unfold over this single summer, C.E. Morgan takes us on a journey which describes the journey of our own lives. This novel is about every single relationship between a man and a woman – past, present and future – and about the distance between the lives we lead and the lives we imagine for ourselves.
Reviews
Praise for ‘All The Living’:
'A distinctive and wonderful book, which lingers and deepens in your mind' Hilary Mantel
'Steeped in dust, sweat, tension and desire, “All the Living” feels like a classic – the finest first novel I've read in years' Tash Aw
‘This striking novel is rich in future promise.’ Sunday Times
‘[A] lyrical tale of grief and gruelling love on a tobacco farm … [Morgan’s] pacing is shrewd. By the time the harvest is done, two lonely people are fused, if not consoled.’ New Yorker
‘As I read the opening pages of “All the Living” I was suddenly no longer in my study but gazing out at the leafy tobacco plants of a small Kentucky farm where a young couple are struggling to make their living, and their lives. In seemingly effortless prose, C.E. Morgan captures both the complexity and the simplicity of Orren’s relentlessly hard work and Aloma’s dangerous drift towards another man. A wonderful debut.’ Margot Livesey
‘[An] elegant debut novel…reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers. Morgan dutifully shows how ambivalence, duty and deceit might play out in a claustrophobic agrarian world.’ TLS
‘A perceptive portrayal of love and the burden of loss in the American South.’ Waterstone’s Books Quarterly
‘Sweetly haunting.’ The List
About the author
C. E. Morgan lives with her husband Will Guild in Berea, Kentucky. She is the author of All the Living.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Morgan's enchanting debut follows the travails of a young woman who moves to Kentucky with her bereaved lover in 1984. Aloma, herself an orphan from a young age, leaves her job at the mission school where she was raised to help her taciturn boyfriend, Orren, with his family farm after his family is killed in a car accident. Once at the farm, he retreats into himself and working the land, leaving Aloma to wrestle with her desire to pursue her dream of being a concert pianist. As her relationship with Orren becomes "more collision than cohabitation," Aloma finds in a local preacher a deep friendship that complicates her feelings for Orren, who drags his feet on marrying her. Young Aloma's growing understanding of love and devotion in the midst of deep despair is delicately and persuasively rendered through the lens of belief be it in religion, relationships or music. Morgan's prose holds the rhythm of the local dialect beautifully, evoking the land, the farming lifestyle and Aloma's awakening with stirring clarity.
