"There are echoes of John Steinbeck in this beautiful and haunting debut novel. . . . Coplin depicts the frontier landscape and the plainspoken characters who inhabit it with dazzling clarity." — Entertainment Weekly
"A stunning debut. . . . Stands on par with Charles Frazier's COLD MOUNTAIN." — The Oregonian (Portland)
New York Times Bestseller • A Best Book of the Year: Washington Post • Seattle Times • The Oregonian • National Public Radio • Amazon • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly • The Daily Beast
At once intimate and epic, The Orchardist is historical fiction at its best, in the grand literary tradition of William Faulkner, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, and Toni Morrison.
In her stunningly original and haunting debut novel, Amanda Coplin evokes a powerful sense of place, mixing tenderness and violence as she spins an engrossing tale of a solitary orchardist who provides shelter to two runaway teenage girls in the untamed American West, and the dramatic consequences of his actions.
At the turn of the twentieth century, in a rural stretch of the Pacific Northwest, a reclusive orchardist, William Talmadge, tends to apples and apricots as if they were loved ones. A gentle man, he's found solace in the sweetness of the fruit he grows and the quiet, beating heart of the land he cultivates. One day, two teenage girls appear and steal his fruit at the market; they later return to the outskirts of his orchard to see the man who gave them no chase.
Feral, scared, and very pregnant, the girls take up on Talmadge's land and indulge in his deep reservoir of compassion, forging an unlikely found family. Just as the girls begin to trust him, men arrive in the orchard with guns, and the shattering tragedy that follows will set Talmadge on an irrevocable course not only to save and protect them but also to reconcile the ghosts of his own troubled past.
In this character-driven story transcribing America as it once was before railways and roads connected its corners, Coplin weaves a tapestry of solitary souls who come together in the wake of unspeakable cruelty and misfortune. She writes with breathtaking precision and empathy, and crafts an astonishing novel about a man who disrupts the lonely harmony of an ordered life when he opens his heart and lets the world in.