Daniel Mason – Country People

Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason (North Woods) for a reading and signing of his new novel Country People—a rollicking, lyrical year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all of the comforts of home behind.

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life. Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner, The Winter Soldier, A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—and North Woods, a New York Times and Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2023 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, adapted for opera and the stage, and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an associate professor in the Stanford University department of psychiatry.

More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Daniel Mason

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.