The Great Far Away - Tapa dura

Prompted by a mysterious letter, aging, solitary Annie Freed recalls what happened to “the tribe:” a group of young, freewheeling bohemians who found themselves slowly taking root during the 1970s in an idyllic Northern California river town. In the course of a generation, two marriages become entangled in a timeless drama, the little town transforms into a high-end suburb, and tribe members absorb—as they must—loss, betrayal, and compromise, while the joyful clarity of youthful desire evolves into something no one could have imagined. Annie ponders the inevitability of a story she herself may have set in motion: “Not asking that things be more or different than they are, but chanting the mournful clearness of what is.” The Great Far Away tells of the relentless working of time upon human lives, and of the passage from sanguine youth to complex adulthood.

JOAN FRANK’s first novel, Miss Kansas City, won the 2006 Michigan Literary Fiction Award. Her story collection, Boys Keep Being Born, was a finalist for both the Bay Area Book Reviewers’ Fiction Award and the Paterson Fiction Award. She is a MacDowell and VCCA Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of the Iowa Writing Award and the Emrys Fiction Award. She lives in Northern California. Learn more online at www.joanfrank.org.