Land Breakers

This opus about the settling of the Blue Ridge Mountains is, quite simply, one of the most important contributions to Appalachian fiction ever written. John Ehle portrays a terrain that has long fascinated the American imagination and its settlers with epic attention to detail, making the novel both a critical document of Appalachian history as well as a singular literary portrait of human fortitude.

Set deep in the Appalachian wilderness between the years of 1779 and 1784,The Land Breakersis a saga like the Norse sagas or the book of Genesis, a story of first and last things, of the violence of birth and death, of inescapable sacrifice and the faltering emergence of community. Mooney and Imy Wright, twenty-one, former indentured servants, long habituated to backbreaking work but not long married, are traveling west. They arrive in a no-account settlement in North Carolina and, on impulse, part with all their savings to acquire a patch of land high in the mountains. With a little livestock and a handful of crude tools, they enter the mountain world-one of transcendent beauty and cruel necessity-and begin to make a world of their own. Mooney and Imy are the first to confront an unsettled country that is sometimes paradise and sometimes hell. They will soon be followed by others. John Ehle is a master of the American language. He has an ear for dialogue and an eye for nature and a grasp of character that have establishedThe Land Breakersas one of the great fictional reckonings with the making of America.

Ideal for readers interested in general fiction.