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- 39,00 kr
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- 39,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
"Ever–ascending Sojourner cooks up wrenching sorrow and hilarious banter, environmental and moral conundrums, magnetizing characters, and a place of transcendent beauty in this intoxicating, provocative, and gloriously told desert tale of wildness and community, unexpected bonds and deep legacies, trauma and healing.”
—BOOKLIST (starred review)
Nell Walker, an LA executive who believed she had everything and learns she had nothing, finds herself boarding a bus rolling away from bitter loss toward a fiercely beautiful landscape, an impossible love affair, and a fight for the earth that brings her back to a past richer than anything she could have imagined.
MARY SOJOURNER is the author of two novels, Sisters of the Dream and Going Through Ghosts; the short story collections The Talker and Delicate; an essay collection, Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest; and memoirs, Solace: Rituals of Loss and Desire and She Bets Her Life. She is an intermittent NPR commentator and the author of many essays, columns and op–eds for High Country News, Writers on the Range, and other publications. A graduate of the University of Rochester, Sojourner teaches writing in private circles, one–on–one, at colleges and universities, writing conferences, and book festivals. She believes in both the limitations and possibilities of healing through writing—the most powerful tool she has found for doing what is necessary to mend. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This standout ecological novel from Arizona author Sojourner (Going Through Ghosts) features picturesque prose, a vivid western setting, and sharply drawn characters. Fifty-five-year-old Nell Walker is fired from her lucrative job as an accounts executive at a pharmaceuticals marketing firm during the 2008 economic downturn. With only $600 to her name, she leaves L.A. on a Greyhound bus and broods over her estranged mother, Tara, who is a "petty dope dealer," and her broken office affair with David. After arriving in the arid, scorching town of Twentynine Palms, Calif., in the Mojave Desert, Nell finds lodging at La Paloma, a women's shelter, and employment as a bookkeeper at an auto repair shop run by Monkey Barnett, a "shade tree mechanic" and "Okie stoner." Monkey is married to Jackie, an RN at a retirement home and a part-time artist. Nell and Monkey banter in the workplace, where she discovers that he has apocalyptic visions, perhaps related to the impending environmental peril facing Twentynine Palms. After Nell befriends Mariah, a local Chemehuevi Native American, they visit her sacred tribal path, where she reveals that FreegreenGlobal, an international solar energy conglomerate, is trying to build a facility on their property. Nell decides to help Mariah in the defense of her people's land and rediscovers her own identity in the process.
