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Staff Pick
Deep Creek, Pam Houston's new memoir, details her life over decades on her 120-acre ranch in Colorado, including rich, vivid details about rural life, and honest, sometimes searing stories about Houston's own history. For any fans of her earlier work, or anyone who loves strong female voices or nature memoirs, Deep Creek hits the spot. Recommended By Jill O., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston's sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.
In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston's most profound meditations yet on how "to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief... to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive."
Review
"Houston has a great range of vision, and she's fun to read. She gets the land right.... In this perfectly American memoir, a restless heart finds its place." Craig Childs, author of Atlas of a Lost World
Review
"Pam Houston is in possession of a deep, heart- achingly beautiful love for her own personal piece of earth. And as equally deep is her ability for hope." Sara Cutaia
Review
"Deep Creek is a love letter to earth, animals, and the best of humanity. Pam Houston has taken our heartache and woven it back into hope...This is the book we need right now to remind us how to endure — passionately. An unstoppable heart song." Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Misfit's Manifesto
About the Author
Pam Houston is the prize-winning author of Contents May Have Shifted, among other books. She is professor of English at the University of California-Davis and lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.