About the Book
Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family.
So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.
But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, who possesses, in Kate’s, words, ‘a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere’. Soon he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales – from a ghostly tree surgeon, to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress, and a photographer of snowflakes – until at last he stumbles upon a bizarre local legend, which, he begins to suspect, might not be a legend at all.
Format: Hardcover (320 pages) Publisher: John Murray Press
Publication date: 7th July 2026 Genre: Contemporary Fiction
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My Review
I like to imagine Daniel Mason sitting at his desk in his room at Stanford University eating an apple (an ‘Osgood’s Wonder’ in case you’re curious). In front of him is a receptacle, possibly an object found while foraging or perhaps a gift from a grateful PhD student. It contains pieces of paper, each with a different genre written on it, intended to be a source of inspiration for his next book. Will he pluck out ‘historical fiction’ meaning he embarks on something like The Winter Soldier again? Or will it be ‘short stories’ meaning another collection along the lines of A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth? He pulls out a piece of paper. It reads ‘contemporary fiction, but make it funny’.
I found it impossible to write a ‘traditional’ review of Country People. Instead here are ten things I loved about it:
- The route planned by Miles for the family’s three week journey to Vermont taking in ‘twenty-seven states, eighteen important wildlife areas, a national park no one had ever heard of [and] forests in states popularly conceived of as having no forests’
- The family’s introduction to the convenience food of rural America: ‘hot dogs the color of an old lady’s nail polish’, ‘energy drinks with fascist fonts’, ‘Pennzoil-colored meat sticks’
- Miles’s insatiable curiosity and childlike enthusiasm for mastering new skills: scything, skate skiing, learning the Basque language
- The eccentric characters: drama teacher Nausicaa, mastermind of the local school’s fully inclusive production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Titus Andronicus having being rejected as unsuitable); The Rat Man of Vermont; snowflake photographer Bentley; Hugh, nature trail guide and hollow-earther
- The humour: the transcripts of calls to the local radio phone-in programme The Miscellanous Minute, ‘the only Minute that’s actually an Hour’; Kate’s friend Miranda’s published works including ‘Trends in Mini-Horses’, ‘Can-Throwing Behaviours of Rural American Males’ and ‘Community Threads: Tracing Social Change Through Clothing Labels’
- The heartwarming history of Miles and Kate’s relationship and the challenges they have faced and overcome together
- The meetings of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society
- The Easter eggs’ for those who’ve read North Woods
- The family’s transition from outsiders to ‘country people’
- The curtain call for everyone you’ve encountered in the book that demonstrate just how immersed Miles has become in the local community
Country People made me smile, even laugh out loud on a few occasions which is rare for me. I can’t wait to find out what genre Daniel Mason picks for his next book. I’m pretty sure I’ll read it whatever it is.
I received an advance reader copy courtesy of John Murray Press via NetGalley. Country People is book 5 of my 20 Books of Summer.
In three words: Clever, funny, heartwarming
Try something similar: North Woods by Daniel Mason
About the Author
Daniel Mason is a physician and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020) – a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize – and North Woods (2023). His work has been translated into 28 languages, awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales for the Royal Opera House in London, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre in Chicago.
His short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story, Zyzzyva, Narrative, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and have been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize.
A Clinical Assistant Professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.
Connect with Daniel
Website
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