Searoad

A brand new edition of Ursula Le Guin's most realistic novel - Searoad offers thirteen beguiling, interconnected stories about the lives of women and artists in a small coastal town in Oregon

Searoad is a sandy track that runs between the town of Klatsand and the rugged Oregon coast.

Across this stretch, locals with roots in the town overlap with visitors staying in its run-down motels: a man questions his wife's desire to be a poet; a summering librarian indulges in an affair; a waitress recalls the shooting of her teenage daughter by her own husband. And always, women walk on the long, long beach.

And as the narrative shifts from the horizontal present to the vertical past, a four-generation chain of mothers and daughters reaches back to Klatsand's beginnings - and forward to its future.

In Searoad, trailblazing feminist author Ursula K. Le Guin paints a vivid and powerfully evocative portrait of a small community built over the course of a century.

Review

Searoad is a collection of realist stories that edges boldly into enriching borders of myth ― New York Times

Rich, warm, and as easy on the soul as an afternoon on the beach ― Kirkus Reviews

A vision of multiplicity and endless change and continuity ― Los Angeles Times

Many of the tales center around women drawn together in threes - mother, daughter, grandmother - by illness or death. Passionate, independent and questioning, these characters generally choose, sooner or later, personal freedom over convention, but not without pain . . . Idiosyncratic and convincing, LeGuin's characters have a long afterlife. ― Publishers Weekly

It's more of a kalaidoscope than a mosaic . . . It's beautiful ― Tor.com

About the Author

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children's books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA's Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.