Overview

Composed in small scenes, Followed by the Lark is a novel of meditations--on loss, on change, on the danger and healing that come from communion with the natural world. Henry David Thoreau's connection to nature was tied to his feelings of grief: before he was twenty-seven years old and went to live at Walden Pond, two of those closest to him had died--his older brother, John, and his friend Charles Wheeler. Nature provided solace for these losses, but the world was changing around him. The forests were being destroyed by the logging industry. Wildlife was increasingly slaughtered for profit and sport. The railroad clanged through his quiet hometown. And the catastrophes of the American Civil War were beginning to stir just as his own life was coming to an end. Haunting in its quiet spaces, in the way it imagines the missed connections in his relationships, Followed by the Lark is uncommon in its combination of scope and brevity, in its communion with its subject while still maintaining critical distance. Thoreau's life in the early nineteenth century seems firmly in the past, but his time bears striking similarities to ours. As she explores these intersections in Followed by the Lark, Helen Humphreys elegantly, insistently illustrates how Thoreau's concerns are still, vitally, our own.

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Helen Humphreys is an acclaimed, award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her work includes the novels The Evening Chorus, Coventry, and Afterimage, and the nonfiction books And a Dog Called Fig, The Ghost Orchard, and The Frozen Thames. She has won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Toronto Book Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Award, and CBC Radio's Canada Reads. Jennifer Pickens is an experienced audiobook narrator. A storyteller since childhood, she now uses her smooth tone and confident grasp of character and pacing to bring authors' words to life. A resident of Oregon, she can often be found reading, drinking tea, metalsmithing, quilting, or playing the mountain dulcimer.

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