The Orchardist
“When you pick up The Orchardist, you will be lured at first by the lushness of the language, the razor-sharp vividness of the descriptive passages. But soon enough—before you’ve finished the first chapter—the characters will take hold of you and you’ll read on hungrily, as if under a spell. It’s hard to believe that this is Amanda Coplin’s first novel. Already, she is a masterful writer, the teller of an epic, unvarnished tale that sits comfortably with other novels in the tradition of great American storytelling.”
Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author
A Publishers Weekly Pick of Novels on Women in the Wild
“[A] mysterious, compelling, elemental novel….In The Orchardist, Amanda Coplin shows us what’s unknowable.”
—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of National Book Award finalist, American Salvage
“Within this world are compelling characters and their equally compelling stories. The Orchardist is an outstanding debut.”
—Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling author of Serena and The Cove
“Coplin is a masterful writer, the teller of an epic, unvarnished tale that sits comfortably with other novels in the tradition of great American storytelling.”
—Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed
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.
Praise