With her acclaimed memoir In the Wilderness Kim Barnes brought us to the great forests of Idaho, where geography and isolation shape love and family. Now, in her luminous new novel, she returns to this territory, offering a powerful tale of hope and idealism, faith and madness.

It is 1960 when Thomas Deracotte and his pregnant wife, Helen, abandon a guaranteed future in upper-crust Connecticut and take off for a utopian adventure in the Idaho wilderness. They buy a farm sight unseen and find the buildings collapsed, the fields in ruins. But they have a tent, a river full of fish, and acres overgrown with edible berries and dandelion greens. Helen learns to make coffee over a fire as they set about rebuilding the house. Though Thomas discovers he can’t wield a hammer or an ax, there is a local boy, Manny—a sweet soul of eighteen without a family of his own—who agrees to manage the fields in exchange for room and board. Their optimism and desire carry them through the early days.

But the sudden, frightening birth of Thomas and Helen’s daughter, Elise, changes something deep inside their marriage. And then, in the aftermath of a tragic accident to which only Manny bears witness, suspicion, anger, and regret come to haunt this shattered family. It is a legacy Elise will inherit and struggle with, until she ultimately finds a hope of her own.

In this extraordinary novel, Kim Barnes reminds us of what it means to be young and in love, to what lengths people will go to escape loneliness, and the redemption found in family.

“The idealistic dreams and careless attitudes of the 1960s echo through this powerful novel…. Barnes captures Northwest country with a poet's eye.” –Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“A Country Called Home feels like a classic. It is beautifully written with complex, flawed characters and an unpredictable and fascinating plot. Readers will ponder the meaning of family, nature, grief and joy set against the gorgeous backdrop of Idaho's wilderness as the young Deracottes' dreams smack into harsh reality. An engrossing, sometimes heartbreaking read with a leavening of hopefulness, Kim Barnes’s new novel is not to be missed.” –Bookreporter

“Kim Barnes’s new novel is an exquisitely complex story, by turns pointed and poignant, about everything that matters: family, loyalty, religion, memory, love.” –Brady Udall, author of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

“A seductive book of love and obsession, Kim Barnes's new novel, A Country Called Home, explores the consequences of a man’s single-minded vision and the family made to walk the knife’s edge between control and freedom. It is an elegant work, a lyrical feast so richly imagined it feels genuinely lived. Some books are easily put down, but the best of them, like A Country Called Home, won’t let go of you.” –Claire Davis, author of Winter Range

“Quietly haunting…. [Barnes’s] descriptions of the rugged landscape quiver with stark beauty, wisdom and redemptive grace, much as her characters do.” –The Washington Post

“Fiction latticed with mystery, animated by myth, spiked with menace, and rooted in the raw poetry of the Idaho landscape. . . . Barnes ascends in this incandescent novel of sacrifice and devotion, wildness and civilization. Such anguish, such beauty.” –Booklist (starred)

“Barnes's second novel radiates compassion. . . . Covering 17 years, Barnes's spellbinding story details personal tragedy and failed Sixties idealism but ends with the hope of a new generation. Highly recommended.” –Library Journal (Starred)

“The country through which Kim Barnes's characters travel in this novel of spiritual and emotional searching is a landscape eroded by grief and yearning and ultimately shame for our dissolution from our gods.  I finished reading A Country Called Home some time ago and still cannot quite move on from the experience.” –Mark Spragg, author of An Unfinished Life

“A Country Called Home is a weave of human longings, accurate in its rendering of the ways they accumulate, always human, confounding and often heartbreaking but ultimately heartening. Give it a while, watch it come to life, and you'll find yourself rationing the pages, wishing it was longer. Kim Barnes is to be envied for her ability to open doors on the secret life of all our times.” –William Kittredge, author of The Willow Field

From the author of the acclaimed memoir and Pulitzer Prize finalist "In the Wilderness" comes a luminous novel of youthful idealism, of faith and madness, of love and family.

Kim Barnes is the author of the novel Finding Caruso and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize—and Hungry for the World. She is coeditor with Mary Clearman Blew of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, and with Claire Davis of Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, MORE magazine, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.