In the Kingdom of Men
Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I’m a bare-foot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that.
1967. Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Raised in a two-room shack by her Oklahoma grandfather, a strict Methodist minister, Gin had never believed that someone like Mason would look her way. But nothing can prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia. In the gated compound of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back—even among the veiled women and strict laws of shariah, Gin’s life has become the stuff of fairy tales. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead, washed up on the shores of the Persian Gulf, Gin’s world closes in around her, and the one person she trusts is nowhere to be found. Set against the gorgeously etched landscape of a country on the cusp of enormous change, In the Kingdom of Men abounds with sandstorms and locust swarms, shrimp peddlers, pearl divers, and Bedouin caravans– a luminous portrait of life in the desert. Award-winning author Kim Barnes weaves a mesmerizing, richly imagined tale of Americans out of their depths in Saudi Arabia, a marriage in peril, and one woman’s quest for the truth, no matter what it might cost her.
A Country Called Home
“I’m afraid, Thomas. I want to go to the hospital.” Helen’s dark eyes grew large, and she began to moan, low and ascending, a sound so animal that it made the hair on Deracotte’s neck rise.
A Country Called Home is a powerful novel of young love and rural isolation from the acclaimed author of In the Wilderness. Thomas Deracotte is just out of medical school, and he and his pregnant wife, Helen, have their whole future mapped out for them in upper-crust Connecticut. But they are dreamers, and they set out to create their own farm in rural Idaho instead. The fields are in ruins when they arrive, so they hire a young farmhand named Manny to help rebuild. But the sudden, frightening birth of their daughter, Elise, tests the young couple, and Manny is called upon to mend this fractured family–a healing that Thomas Deracotte finds himself unable to perform. What the years bring is not back-to-the-land contentment but a growing desire in each of the characters for something else, something more. An extraordinary story of wide-eyed idealism, lost hope, and hard-won redemption, A Country Called Home is a testament to the power of family—the family we are born to and the family we create.
Finding Caruso
“It’s bad this time,” Lee says.
I have come to join him at the fence, where we stand and watch our father trying to saddle the pinto mare.
We are brothers, Lee and I. Will always be. I am ten. He is seventeen. It is 1950, and our father is three days dry and angry.
Seven years separate Buddy from his big brother, Lee, but the boys have always been close, comforting and protecting each other as their father–defeated by poor land and hostile weather–sank deeper into alcohol and rage. When a drink-fueled accident takes not only his life but that of the mother who tried so hard to shield her sons, the boys sell off what little remains of their daddy’s tenant farm and leave Oklahoma. It is 1957, and work is still to be had in the logging camps of northern Idaho. But just outside Snake Junction, they stop at a roadhouse, and there, Lee’s country-and-western talents get him a job. The two settle in, Lee to his music–and women and drink–and seventeen-year-old Buddy to roaming the landscape, at loose ends until a woman nearly twice his age turns up. Irene Sullivan is a smoky beauty, and Lee makes a play for her. But it is Buddy she wants. By turns darkly violent and heartbreakingly tender, Finding Caruso is a work of extraordinary emotional power from an astonishingly original writer.
Hungry for the World
“No one needs to know,” my mother once said to me, “what has happened in the past.” But without that map, I cannot find my beginnings, trace the progress of my own journey.
From the author of the critically acclaimed In the Wilderness comes a riveting new narrative of self-discovery and personal triumph. Hungry for the World is the story of how an intelligent and passionate young woman, yearning for an understanding of the world beyond her insular family life, found her way. On the day of her 1976 high school graduation in Lewiston, Idaho, Kim Barnes decided she could no longer abide the patriarchal domination of family and church. After a disagreement with her father – a logger and fervent adherent to the Pentecostal Christian faith – she gathered her few belongings and struck out on her own. She had no skills and no funds, but she had the courage and psychological sturdiness to make her way and to eventually survive the influence of a man whose dominance was of a different and more menacing sort. Hungry for the World is a classic story of the search for knowledge and its consequences, both dire and beautiful
In the Wilderness
I carry it all with me, in the quiet pools and strong currents of my being. I fill my hands with the black dirt left by the river’s birth. I believe that what I hold in my hands is memory: like the river, it takes what it touches, carrying it along until all that remains is the bed over which the water flows.
Poet Kim Barnes grew up in northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a modest but comfortable home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth but long on the riches of family, friendship, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness. But in the mid-1960’s, as automation and a declining economy drove more and more loggers out of the wilderness and into despair, Kim’s father dug in and determined to stay. It was then the family turned fervently toward Pentecostalism. It was then things changed. In the Wilderness is the poet’s own account of a journey toward adulthood against an interior landscape every bit as awesome, as beautiful, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great forest itself. It is a story of how both faith and geography can shape the heart and soul, and of the uncharted territory we all must enter to face our demons. Above all, it is the clear-eyed and moving account of a young woman’s coming of terms with her family, her homeland, her spirituality, and herself.