In the latest installment in Wendell Berry's long story about the citizens of Port William, Hannah Coulter remembers. Her first husband, Virgil, was declared "missing in action" shortly after the Battle of the Bulge, and after she married Nathan Coulter about all he could tell Hannah about the Battle of Okinawa was "Ignorant boys, killing each other." The community was stunned and diminished by the war, with some of its sons lost forever and others returning home determined to carry on. Now, in her late seventies, twice-widowed and alone, Hannah sorts through her memories: of her childhood, of young love and loss, of raising children and the changing seasons. She turns her plain gaze to a community facing its long deterioration, where, she says, "We feel the old fabric torn, pulling apart, and we know how much we have loved each other." Hannah offers her summation: her stories and her gratitude, for the membership in Port William, and for her whole life, a part of the great continuum of love and memory, grief and strength. Book jacket. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Starred Review. "This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed.... This is my story, my giving of thanks." So begin the reflections of Hannah Coulter, the twice-widowed protagonist of this slim, incandescent novel in Berry's Port William series. In 1940, the precocious, innocent Hannah leaves her small Kentucky farming town to work as a secretary in nearby Hargrave, where she meets Virgil Feltner, seven years her senior, who gently courts her. They marry and have a daughter, but Virgil, "called to the army in 1942," dies in the Battle of the Bulge. Love follows mourning, as a kind but driven farmer, Nathan Coulter, returns from combat and woos Hannah. In delicate, shimmering prose, Berry tracks Hannah's loves and losses through the novel's first half; the narrative sharpens as Hannah recounts her children's lives Margaret becomes a schoolteacher with a troubled son; Mattie ("a little too eager to climb Fool's Hill") flees rural life to become a globe-trotting communication executive; Caleb, Nathan's hope to run the family farm, becomes a professor of agriculture instead. Beneath the story of ordinary lives lies the work of an extraordinarily wise novelist: as Hannah relates her children's fate to her own deeply rooted rural background, she weaves landscape and family and history together ("My mind... is close to being the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal and all creatures prosperous"). Her compassion enlivens every page of this small, graceful novel. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

For the first 40 pages or so, Berry's latest novel about the Kentucky farming community called, by its inhabitants as well as the author, the Port William membership, seems more of same. A good same, for few write American English more limpidly than Berry, and he has realized his characters as thoroughly as Faulkner did any of the people of Yoknapatawpha County. But as this telling of a farm woman's life in her voice continues--and voice it seems more than writing, so spontaneously speechlike are its cadences and the simple accuracy of its diction--it feels ever more poetic. Not gnomic and surrealist, like prose poetry, but flowing and long breathed, like epic poetry. Of course, the story it tells is epical, that of a heroine who expresses, in her living and doing, the essence of her people. Its character is domestic rather than martial; though, since its time span includes World War II, its trials include the MIA disappearance of Hannah's first husband and the ghastly combat experience of her second, Nathan Coulter, which Hannah learns of with any precision only after his death a half-century later. If its domesticity is more often happy and fulfilling, though, the cultural movement--the short, precipitate, ill-informed, poorly considered demise of the American family farm--over which Hannah's beautiful and heartbreaking story arches is as tragic as any war. RayOlson. From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Author of over forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, including Citizenship Papers, Wendell Berry has farmed a hillside in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for over thirty years. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the T. S. Eliot Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, and the John Hay Award of the Orion Society Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Part 1
1 The Story Continuing	3
2 A Steadman	6
3 The Future Shining Before Us	16
4 Virgil	20
5 What We Were	32
6 One of the Feltners, a Member of Port William	41
7 "Missing"	49
Part 2
8 Nathan	61
9 Generosity	73
10 Our Place	81
11 The Membership	91
12 Burley	96
13 Ivy	102
14 The Room of Love	105
15 A Better Chance	111
16 M. B. Coulter	121
17 Caleb	126
18 Margaret	135
19 The Branches	146
Part 3
20 The Living	157
21 Okinawa	167
22 Next?	174
23 Virge	181
24 Given	186
Acknowledgments	189
Map of Port William	192
Genealogy of Port William	194

Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.