| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £5.30
Trade in Always Coming Home (California Fiction) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £5.30, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Plus, get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Much of the book is concerned with explaining the culture, lands and world of a fictional people called the Kesh. They live in a mediterranean-climate river valley in northern California. The world is one of the far future, some thousands of years from now, in which natural and man-made disasters have devastated human civilzation as we understand it. People are now rural and parochial, the old industrial era now no more than legend and bad memory.
The detail of the setting is astounding. The songs, art, technology, beliefs, rituals etc. of the Kesh are all treated with. Their culture is based around a metaphorical conception of the world, which is far too complex to explain here (read, and re-read, the book). It takes a while to understand the Kesh as their society is so unlike our industrial capitalist one. They do have a strong Native American flavour, but think Iroquois rather than Apache.
The novel itself, which is actually just the longest of a number of stories, serves to illustrate the setting by way of the learning of the central character and the contrast with a very different culture in the Kesh's world.
This is not an easy book to read, it takes time and patience to get to grips with. There is a lot of pleasure to be had though in coming to understand the setting. If you like to read history, sociology, anthropology etc. as well as just fiction though you will love the intellectual depth and sophistication of this work.
It's rather difficult for me to give a rating on this book, since it's so unlike other novels. Certainly it's a work of immense skill, and develops further Le Guin's concepts of societies founded on something other than the pursuit of wealth and power. Whether you think her society realistic or not (I have to say I never quite believed the communistic society in her novel The Dispossessed) you can still enjoy and admire it. Overall it's got to get the five stars.
This wonderful book contains stories, poems, songs, drawings, maps, plays, even a dictionary of sorts; and if you like you can also buy a CD with the tunes described in the book.
Magical, mystical, wonderful - and I hope it will some day be rated as a true classic by one of the western world's greatest writers.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
