Hannah Coulter: A Novel

by Wendell Berry

Overview

"Ignorant boys, killing each other," is just about all Nathan Coulter would tell his wife, friends, and family about the Battle of Okinawa in the spring of 1945. Life carried on for the community of Port William, Kentucky, as some boys returned from the war and the lives of others were mourned. In her seventies, Nathan's wife, Hannah, has time now to tell of the years since the war. In Wendell Berry's unforgettable prose, we learn of the Coulter's children, of the Feltners and Branches, and how survivors "live right on."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582439907
Publisher:	Counterpoint Press
Publication date:	10/10/2005
Series:	Port William
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	54,862
File size:	814 KB

About the Author

Author of over forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, including Citizenship Papers, Wendell Berry has farmed a hillside in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for over thirty years. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the T. S. Eliot Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, and the John Hay Award of the Orion Society.

Table of Contents

Editorial Reviews

Susan Denaker brings twice-widowed farm wife Hannah to life with soft-spoken but resolute dignity. As the 20th century closes and a new millennium begins, the elderly-yet fiercely self-sufficient-Hannah reflects on her past, especially the crucial threads of family, community and the soil. Denaker does an especially effective job of portraying the other figures in the "Port William Membership" in a manner that fits the approach of the first-person narrative. She adjusts the octave and tone of the male and female characters of varying ages just enough to set them apart from each another, but listeners can be certain that Hannah maintains full control of her own storytelling. The experience evokes a sublime visit to a beloved grandmother figure with memories and wisdom to impart. A Shoemaker & Hoard paperback (Reviews, Oct. 4, 2004). (June)

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Publishers Weekly

T.S. Elliot Award®-winning author Berry's series set in the imaginary town of Port William, KY, and begun in 1960 with the story of Nathan Coulter comes full circle with this offering containing the reminiscences of his widow, Hannah. Now alone on her farm, Hannah recounts her life starting with her Depression-era childhood. Narrator Susan Denaker (The Double Bind) manages to impart the feeling that the listener is seated across from Hannah at her kitchen table as she tells her story, making this audio edition extremely successful. Highly recommended for fiction collections in all public, academic, and church libraries. [Audio clip available through www.christianaudio.com.-Ed.]
—Nancy Reed

Library Journal

A continuation of Berry's Port William, Kentucky, saga (Jayber Crow, 2000, etc.), this one told from the perspective of an elderly farmwife looking back on her life and world. Hannah Coulter comes from that long-past generation of rural Americans who fully expect their lives to pass as uneventfully as their parents' and grandparents' and God only knows how many ancestors' before them. A girl during the hard years of the Great Depression, Hannah experiences want at an early age and learns to make do with little and hope for even less. After growing up on a farm, and after high school, she goes to work as a secretary for a local lawyer and marries her landlady's nephew Virgil, who gives her one daughter just before he goes overseas in WWII and dies in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, she marries Nathan, another veteran, who comes from humbler circumstances but works hard to make a living on a small Port William farm for his wife and stepdaughter and their two subsequent sons. Her story takes in the better part of the late 20th century and amounts to a kind of elegy for the starkly beautiful country life that Hannah had always taken for granted but came to love all the more as it faded into history, victim of economic and social change. Her three children all make their way through college and drift from home to become academics and entrepreneurs, while Nathan is more and more hard-pressed to keep the farm running. When he eventually dies of cancer, Hannah thinks the book has finally closed on the Coulter farm-but last-minute help from an expected quarter gives hope to the possibility that a new generation will take charge of the family legacy. Atmospheric and quietly moving: a talethat manages to avoid outright bathos as it makes its way along the narrow boundary between memoir and nostalgia.

Kirkus Reviews