THE LAND BREAKERS
Set deep in the Appalachian wilderness between the years of 1779 and 1784,The Land Breakers is a saga like the Norse sagas or the book of Genesis, a story of first and last things, of the violence of birth and death, of inescapable sacrifice and the faltering emergence of community.
Mooney and Imy Wright, twenty-one, former indentured servants, long habituated to backbreaking work but not long married, are traveling west. They arrive in a no-account settlement in North Carolina and, on impulse, part with all their savings to acquire a patch of land high in the mountains.
Set deep in the Appalachian wilderness between the years of 1779 and 1784,The Land Breakers is a saga like the Norse sagas or the book of Genesis, a story of first and last things, of the violence of birth and death, of inescapable sacrifice and the faltering emergence of community.
Mooney and Imy Wright, twenty-one, former indentured servants, long habituated to backbreaking work but not long married, are traveling west. They arrive in a no-account settlement in North Carolina and, on impulse, part with all their savings to acquire a patch of land high in the mountains. With a little livestock and a handful of crude tools, they enter the mountain world—one of transcendent beauty and cruel necessity—and begin to make a world of their own.
Mooney and Imy are the first to confront an unsettled country that is sometimes paradise and sometimes hell. They will soon be followed by others.
John Ehle is a master of the American language. He has an ear for dialogue and an eye for nature and a grasp of character that have established The Land Breakers as one of the great fictional reckonings with the making of America.
- NYRB Classics
- Paperback
- November 2014
- 368 Pages
- 9781590177631
Buy the Book
$17.95
About John Ehle & Linda Spalding (Introduction by)
John Ehle (b. 1925) grew up the eldest of five children in the mountains of North Carolina, which would become the setting for many of his novels and several works of nonfiction. Following service in World War II, Ehle received his BA and MA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he met the playwright Paul Green and began writing plays for the NBC radio series American Adventure. He taught at the university for ten years before joining the staff of the North Carolina governor Terry Sanford, where Ehle was a “one-man think tank,” the governor’s “idea man” from 1962 to 1964. (Sanford once said of Ehle: “If I were to write a guidebook for new governors, one of my main suggestions would be that he find a novelist and put him on his staff.”) The author of eleven novels, seven of which constitute his celebrated Mountain Novels cycle, and six works of nonfiction, Ehle divides his time between Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and New York City. He is married to the actress Rosemary Harris, with whom he has one daughter, Jennifer Ehle, also an actress.
Linda Spalding was born in Kansas and moved to Canada in 1982. She has written four novels, Daughters of Captain Cook, The Paper Wife, Mere (co-written with her daughter, Esta), and most recently, The Purchase, for which she received the Governor General’s Award. Among her nonfiction books are A Dark Place in the Jungle: Science, Orangutans, and Human Nature and Who Named the Knife: A True Story of Murder and Memory. Spalding is an editor of the journal Brick and has been awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contributions to Canadian literature.
Praise
“The Land Breakers is one of the best recreations of our pioneer past that we have had in years, honest and compassionate, rich and true…In a time of dreamless heroes, of long-winded whimpers that pass as novels, The Land Breakers has a rare degree of greatness.”
—The New York Times
“The Land Breakers is a great American novel, way beyond anything most New York literary icons have produced.
—Michael Ondaatje, from “My Book of the Decade,” The Globe and Mail
“Sometimes raw as winter wind, sometimes gentle as a summer night, Ehle has made his land breakers a believable group of individuals driven by ancient hungers into a new country.” —Chicago Tribune
“Ehle’s people, all of them, are splendid…Ehle’s prose is exactly suited to his subject and setting. His people talk the way North Carolina mountain people talk; there is nothing stilted or artificial about his dialogue. And his descriptive prose is quite marvelous; it has an air of country formality and mannerliness that is thoroughly distinctive.” —The Washington Post