“Barnes channels the experiences chronicled in her indelible memoir, In the Wilderness, into fiction latticed with mystery, animated by myth, spiked with menace, and rooted in the raw poetry of the Idaho landscape. This archetypal tale of paradise lost begins when Thomas Deracotte, a newly minted doctor, and his new wife, Helen, leave Connecticut for Idaho to start a rural practice and farm. The only smart thing they do is hire Manny, a self-reliant orphan of many trades. Deracotte has also had a rough life, unlike wealthy Helen, who defied her family to marry him. They are abysmally ignorant about farming, and Deracotte is no doctor. A daughter, Elise, is born. Bewitched by the land, Deracotte turns feral, and Helen despairs. It’s up to Manny to run the show. The potential for tragedy is so intense, one seems to sense the approach of a stalking predator in dense woods. Then, as Elise comes of age and struggles to understand her strange, haunted household and painful legacy, the great wheel of life turns and new sorrows are sown. Barnes ascends in this incandescent novel of sacrifice and devotion, wildness and civilization. Such anguish, such beauty.”
Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“In the literature of the American frontier, few setups are as fertile and reliable as the Easterner come West… Because [Barnes] knows the territory so intimately, A Country Called Home is filled with exquisitely etched landscapes. The novel brims with the smell of brambles and berries along an Idaho riverbank, the gritty feel of the dust in an abandoned homesteader’s shack, the sounds of grouse and quail in the fields.”
The New York Times Book Review
“In the tradition of the great Western writer Willa Cather, Kim Barnes has written a novel [that is] deeply rooted in the soil of her native Idaho.”
The Oregonian
“Quietly haunting… [Barnes’s] descriptions of the rugged landscape quiver with stark beauty, wisdom and redemptive grace, much as her characters do.”
The Washington Post
“Brilliant. . . . One of three epigraphs, from master writer John Gardner, reads, ‘The fall from grace is endless.’ And so it is with Manny, Thomas, Helen and Elise, who are always and slowly losing the battle not just with nature, but with themselves.”
St. Louis Post Dispatch
“A Country Called Home, like many Western works of its kind, is a story of perseverance. Barnes’s characters, all carrying their own secret pain, barely keep their heads above the waters that rage around them, literally and figuratively… An elegy of sorts, to the power of the natural world, the lives it so indifferently claims, and the grace with which those affected respond to its blows.”
The Oregonian
“A newly married couple abandon the comfort of upper-class Connecticut and stake their claim in 1960s Fife, Idaho, in Pulitzer-finalist Barnes’s exquisite novel. Thomas and Helen Deracotte—he a young, poor doctor, she a stifled, monied rebel—buy an isolated farm sight unseen and arrive to find it a shambles. Upon arriving in the inhospitable wilderness, Thomas realizes that he would rather live off the land for their daily sustenance than open his own medical practice, and he hires Manny, a handsome teenage vagabond, to help around the farm. When Helen has baby girl Elise, Manny ingratiates himself further with the Deracottes and becomes a loving caretaker. But when the new mother begins to feel suffocated and overwhelmed, she returns to her rebellious ways and finds herself powerfully attracted to Manny. Their relationship has dire consequences for all involved—particularly for Helen and Elise, but nobody gets off easy. Barnes’s descriptions of the rugged landscape are vivid, and the characters’ sadness and desires are revealed with wrenching detail.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“At the heart of this disturbing novel set in the Idaho wilderness is the desperate hunger of its characters to escape ennui and emptiness–in short, to find love… Written in beautiful poetic prose, A Country Called Home is highly recommended.”
The Tennessean
“A Country Called Home feels like a classic… An engrossing, sometimes heartbreaking read with a leavening of hopefulness, Barnes’s new novel is not to be missed.”
Bookreporter
“Barnes’s use of language is stunning, making you want to reread paragraphs out loud to someone else so they can enjoy it with you.”
Sacramento Book Review
“Barnes’s new novel is an exquisitely complex story, by turns pointed and poignant, about everything that matters: family, loyalty, religion, memory, love. With a master’s skill Barnes paints a world tinged with loss, adeptly depicting sentiments left unspoken, relationships stunted by the hard winds of grief and guilt, and singular moments full to brimming with natural beauty and grace.”
Brady Udall
“The country through which Barnes’ characters travel in this novel of spiritual and emotional searching is a landscape eroded by grief and yearning and ultimately shame for our dissolution from our gods. I finished reading A Country Called Home some time ago and still cannot quite move on from the experience.”
Mark Spragg
“A Country Called Home is a weave of human longings, accurate in its rendering of the ways they accumulate… Give it a while, watch it come to life, and you’ll find yourself rationing the pages, wishing it was longer.”
William Kittredge
“A seductive book of love and obsession… Some books are easily put down, but the best of them, like A Country Called Home, won’t let go of you.”
Claire Davis
