Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living - by Carrie Tiffany (Paperback)

About the Book

Sensual, witty, and startlingly original, Tiffanys debut novel--about a young woman, her passionate relationship with an agricultural expert, and their efforts at scientific living--marks the arrival of a great new voice in fiction.

Book Synopsis

The "Better-Farming Train" slides through the wheat fields and small towns of 1930s Australia, bringing advice to farmers. Amid the swaying cars full of cows, pigs, and crops, a strange and swift seduction occurs between Jean Finnegan, a sewing instructor, and Robert Pettergree, a scientist with an unusual taste for soil. In an atmosphere of heady idealism, they settle in the impoverished Mallee farmland with the ambition of transforming the land through science.

In luminous prose Tiffany writes about the challenges of farming, the character of small towns, the stark and terrifying beauty of the Australian landscape, and the fragile relationship between man, science, and nature. This is a sensual and startlingly original debut that establishes Carrie Tiffany as one of the great new voices in fiction.

Review Quotes

"Read it to be transported into another landscape across time and space. Read it to absorb the intuitive wisdom we get from our best fiction. Read it to grow."

-- The Kansas City Star

"Tiffany reminds me of John Steinbeck in the depiction of Dust Bowl living and Ernest Hemingway in the lean, controlled prose that evolves such emotional power. A luminous debut."

-- Rocky Mountain News