An honest, perceptive discussion of children, education, and our common life as a nation by the bestselling author of Snow Falling on Cedars. A high school English teacher, Guterson and his wife educate their own children at home. A literate primer for anyone who wants to know more about alternatives to the schools (Kirkus Reviews). Index.
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From David Guterson--bestselling author of Snow Falling on Cedars--comes this emotionally charged, provocative novel about what happens when a fifteen-year-old girl becomes an instrument of divine grace.
Ann Holmes is a fragile, pill-popping teenaged runaway who receives a visitation from the Virgin Mary one morning while picking mushrooms in the woods of North Fork, Washington. In the ensuing days the miracle recurs, and the declining logging town becomes the site of a pilgrimage of the faithful and desperate. As these people flock to Ann--and as Ann herself is drawn more deeply into...

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award
San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries--memories of a charmed love affair between a white...

The vast wilderness landscapes of the Pacific Northwest become the backdrop for eye-opening discoveries about cruelty, aging, apathy, and the human capacity for grief and deception, in a collection of short stories.

From the author of Snow Falling on Cedars comes this bestselling novel about a dying man s final journey through a landscape that has always sustained him and provided him with hope and challenges.
When he discovers that he has terminal cancer, retired heart surgeon Ben Givens refuses to simply sit back and wait. Instead he takes his two beloved dogs and goes on a last hunt, determined to end his life on his own terms. But as the people he meets and the memories over which he lingers remind him of the mystery of life s endurance, his trek into the American West becomes much...

From the author of the bestselling Snow Falling on Cedars, a coming-of-age novel that presents two powerfully different visions of what it means to live a good life and the compromises that come with fulfillment.
John William Barry and Neil Countryman shared a love of the outdoors, trekking often into Washington's remote backcountry where they had to rely on their wits and each other to survive. Soon after graduating from college, Neil sets out on a path that will lead him toward a life as a devoted schoolteacher and family man. But John William makes a radically different choice,...

A culmination of four years of photographing throughout Oregon, Washington and Northern California, Sawdust Mountain focuses on the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support. Timber and salmon are the bedrock of a regional Northwest identity, but the environmental impact of these declining industries has been increasingly at odds with the contemporary ideal of sustainability. In this, his second book, Johnson reveals a landscape imbued with an uncertain future--no longer the region of boomtowns built upon the riches of...

Written well into mid-life, Songs for a Summons are explorations and observations of a writing life.

In the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington, both the human community and the forest community are threatened with extinction. Virtually every acre of the hills has been logged, often repeatedly, in the past hundred years, endangering both the land and the people, leaving dying towns as well as a devastated ecosystem. Weaving vivid portraits of the place and its inhabitantsanimal, plant, and humanwith the story of his own love affair with the hills, Robert Michael Pyle has written a book so even-handed in its passion that it has been celebrated by those who make their living with a chain saw...