November Grass — Judy Van der Veer

Fiction. "A beautiful book, half novel, half meditation. A twenty-three-year-old farm wife watches over her small herd grazing along a roadside where few cars pass, and she thinks about years gone by and years to come, living the timeless days of the shepherd's and the herder's life, a slow and certain rhythm that frees the mind to consider the changes of the earth and the ways of beasts and men. Her heart and mind are clear, her feelings sharp, intense, contained. Everything is seen with the extreme vividness of the dry autumn light of California, when each object is distinct in itself and the line of the hills is achingly pure against the sky" - from the foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin. "NOVEMBER GRASS is more than a regional novel of truth, body and observation; it is the record of a universe as mirrored in a personality of unusual insight, awareness and poetic power" - New York Times.