Kirjahaku

A National Book Award Finalist for Fiction Set in the Texas/Mexico border country in the years from 1944 to the present, The River Beyond the World is the story of two women on the edge of sexual, moral, political, and spiritual divides. Luisa Cant is a girl from a Sierra Madre mountain village. After being impregnated in a fertility ritual of ancient origin, she leaves Mexico to work in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas as a housemaid for Mrs. Eddie Hatch, a woman with a strong will and a narrow worldview. Their complex relationship--by turns mystical and pragmatic, serious and comic--reveals the many ways human beings can wound one another, the nature of love and sacrifice, and the possibility of forgiveness.

With the same piercing vision that distinguishes her novel The River Beyond The World, Janet Peery unveils a stunning collection of stories. Settled mostly in the American Southwest, her characters-men and women caught between two places, literal and figurative-try to understand the mysteries that overarch or undergird their lives.

Janet Peery’s first novel, The River Beyond the World, was a National Book Award finalist in 1996. Acclaimed for her gorgeous writing and clear-eyed gaze into the hearts of people, Peery now returns with her second novel, The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs. On a summer evening in the blue-collar town of Amicus, Kansas, the Campbell family gathers for a birthday dinner for their ailing patriarch, town judge Abel Campbell, prepared and hosted by their still-hale mother Hattie. But when Billy, the youngest sibling - with a history of addiction, grand ideas, and misdemeanors - passes out in his devil’s food cake, the family takes up the unfinished business of Billy’s sobriety. Billy’s misadventures have too long consumed their lives, in particular Hattie’s, who has enabled his transgressions while trying to save him from Abel’s disappointment. As the older children - Doro, Jesse, ClairBell, and Gideon - contend with their own failures, they compete for the approval of the elderly parents they adore, but can’t quite forgive. With knowing humour and sure-handed storytelling, Janet Peery reveals a family at its best and worst, with old wounds and new, its fractures and feuds, and yet its unbreakable bonds.