Harvest - by Catherine Landis (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

With a history of childhood loss and tragedy, Arliss Greene grows up to love his cattle more than his family. The memory of his family's displacement, due to TVA's construction of Norris Dam, stays with him as he struggles to make a living farming. His son Daniel tries to distance himself, but an inexplicable attachment to East Tennessee causes him to return to the hilltop where he grew up. He is shocked and disappointed when his wife, Leda, a city girl, ends up working with Arliss, farming the family land. Decisions are made, with repercussions that reverberate throughout their lives, the lives of their children, and the life of the farm from the 1930s to the beginning of the new century.

Written with an unerring ear for the cadence and language of the South, Harvest is a powerful, character-driven novel. A story of family, marriage, farming, baseball, the power of memory, and what sustains people through loss, Harvest is a reckoning of sacrifices and a testament to human resilience.

Catherine Landis, the author of the critically lauded BookSense 76 pick Some Days There's Pie, has written a compelling new novel with an assured Southern inflection and lovingly rendered three-dimensional characters.

Review Quotes

"In Harvest, Catherine Landis has given the reader a powerful archetypal story of the inherent connection of the human spirit, the land which supports it, and the devastation which occurs when that tenuous thread is broken. Set in east Tennessee over a period of four generations, the novel sensitively explores the losses, reconciliation, and sacrifice of one family in a voice that rings completely true from beginning to end." --Jeanne Ray, author of Julie and Romeo

"Harvest is an important book, a beautiful American story, and a testament to the power of the land. Catherine Landis's writing is so self-assured it stands in neat rows like a garden, but is incredibly organic at the same time, natural enough to burst forth and envelop the reader with its moving, graceful, and deceptively quiet story. Filled with characters as vivid as the Tennessee landscape Landis so remarkably presents to us, Harvest is a book that will stay with me for a long time." --Silas House, author of A Parchment of Leaves

"Harvest is a vivid story of a time and a place, of land and lives in transition. It is a story of drastic, irreversible but sometimes liberating change. The voices and faces will haunt you long after you put the book down." --Robert Morgan, author of Brave Enemies

"A moving story, which subtly links the life of the heart and the life of the land. Leda is the heroine readers are looking for -- unlikely, and yet believable to the end." --Melany Neilson, author of The Persia Cafe

"Harvest is a beautifully written novel full of characters who come alive with a stunning vividness. Catherine Landis is a writer of rare talent, and Harvest secures her place as an important voice in contemporary fiction." --Ron Rash, author of One Foot in Eden

"An ambitious novel that spans three generations of rural American life, and laments how much we've lost to progress in a clear, honest language that befits Landis's conflicted East Tennessee characters." --Marlin Barton, author of A Broken Thing

About the Author

Catherine Landis is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Some Days There's Pie. She grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina, and lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee.