The Potato Baron — John Thorndike

"The air was clean, the fields vacant, the horizon lined with poplares. In the windless sky above, clouds hung as white as shirts. But all Austin could think of was his absent wife and son."

A powerful novel of love, marriage and the ties that bind men and women together, The Potato Baron asks a timely question: in a marriage of equal partners, who decides where and how to live?

Austin Pooler is Harvard educated, prosperous, in love with his wife, Fay, and devoted to their two children. He hopes always to live in his ancestral farmhouse on the remote, fruitful land in the raw northern tip of Maine where he was raised. To him it is the most beautiful place on earth. But on the sunny spring morning when his wife leaves both Maine and him, taking their eight-year-old son with her to an unknown destination, he is faced with a wrenching choice: He can have his wife or his potato farm, not both.