Site Fidelity: Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Fiction
Finalist for the 2022 Reading the West Debut Fiction Award
Finalist for the 2022 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
Set in the western sagebrush steppe, Site Fidelity is a vivid, intimate, and deeply human exploration of life on the shifting terrain of our changing planet.
Firmly rooted in the modern American West, Site Fidelity follows women and families who feel the instinctual, inexplicable pull of a home they must work to protect from the effects of economic inequity and climate catastrophe. A seventy-four-year-old nun turns to eco-sabotage to stop a fracking project. A woman delivers her own baby in a Nevada ghost town. A young farmer hides her chicken flock from the government during a bird flu epidemic. An ornithologist returns home to care for her rancher father and gets caught up trying to protect a breeding group of endangered Gunnison sage grouse.
In lean, lyrical prose, Claire Boyles evokes the bleakness and beauty of our threatened western landscapes. Spanning the decades from the 1970s to a plausible near future, this knockout debut introduces unforgettable characters who must confront the challenges of caregiving and loss alongside the very practical impacts of fracking, water rights law, and other agricultural policies. Site Fidelity is a vivid, intimate, and deeply human exploration of life on the shifting terrain of our changing planet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boyles's debut collection bristles with intelligence and determination as her characters face the harsh realities of the American West, from the 1970s to the near future. In "Ledger," a rancher's daughter grapples with her father's stroke and selling their land, which protects a grouse native to the area. Other stories trace domestic fault lines. In "Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars," a woman reckons with expecting a baby while in an unhappy marriage, and "Early Warning Systems" tracks a marriage's dissolution. "Sister Agnes Mary in the Spring of 2012" features a nun who takes a stand on fracking, and "Lost Gun, $1,000 Reward. No Questions," follows two brothers en route to see their dying father. The linked "Flood Stories," "Natural Resource Management," and "Best Response to Fear" explore the lives of three sisters and their children, one of whom is a police officer convicted of falsifying evidence to incriminate people, including his best friend. At their best, the stories of women dealing with messes men left behind evoke the characters' grit and hope as well as a sense of place, colored in by their concern for the environment. Fans of Annie Proulx and John Sayles will love this.
