The New Valley
Novellas
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Great Glass Sea, three linked novellas set between the Virginias about men confronting love, loss, and personal demons.
Set in the hardscrabble hill country between the Virginias, The New Valley contains characters striving to forge new lives in the absence of those they have loved. Told in three varied and distinct voices—a soft-spoken middle-aged beef farmer struggling to hold himself together after his dad's death; a health-obsessed single father desperate to control his reckless, overweight daughter; and a developmentally delayed man who falls in love with a married woman intent on using him in a scheme that will wound them both—each story explores survival, isolation, and the deep, consuming ache for human connection.
As the men battle against grief and solitude, their heartache leads them all to commit acts that will bring both ruin and salvation, in these tales "full of tenderness and looming menace" (The New York Times Book Review).
"Stark and haunting . . . Delivers great beauty" —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"[Weil's] language is exquisite, his sentences glorious. . . . Refreshing and engaging." —Ploughshares
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weil's debut is a stark and haunting triptych of novellas set in the rusted-out hills straddling the border between the Virginias. In "Ridge Weather," Osby, a hardscrabble cattle rancher, finds himself lonely and isolated after his father's suicide. In the aftermath he struggles to make some sort of a personal connection in increasingly desperate attempts to be needed by someone. In "Stillman Wing," the elderly Charlie Stillman, afraid of his own mortality, tries to reinvigorate his life by stealing and reconditioning a tractor, all the while maintaining a relationship with his obese, promiscuous daughter and coming to terms with the death of his barnstormer parents. "Sarverville Remains," takes the form of a letter from Geoffrey Sarver, a mildly retarded orphan, to an incarcerated man whose wife he has fallen in love with, and takes on the elements of a well-told crime story. All three pieces, despite their somber tones, offer renewal for their protagonists. Taken individually, each novella offers its own tragic pleasures, but together, the works create a deeply human landscape that delivers great beauty.
