Border Country

Few novels are as beautiful and compelling as those simple stories that are steeped in the essence of a place and time, and yet powerfully reflect our universal experience. Border Country fits easily among much more recognized time-and-place classics like Tarjei Vesaas' Ice Palace and Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow. Analyzing a place and time and the people who lived there is never a proxy for being there with them. The power of Border Country is that the style and tone--pared down, local, and direct--is really of the time and place and so has the authentic power to transport you into the lives of Harry, Ellen, Matthew, and the others connected to the border country. If you're a deep thinker, you can dig many themes out of this novel--trying to return home, honoring labor, being part of a community with all its vagaries, finding a sense of place, and integrating who you've become with the place from which you came. If you're an academic, you can even dig much deeper in William's works, as he himself did, in the backwards evolution of our increasingly commercialized--and disassociated--culture. Or if you simply want to read and appreciate a beautiful story about real lives, Williams welcomes you to do that too.