John Ehle

It's the early 1800s and August King, a farmer in the mountains of Western North Carolina, encounters a runaway slave girl and finds himself facing a moral decision that could cost him his own freedom, property, and even his life.

It is late autumn when Collie Wright sees a man moving through the woods toward her cabin on the edge of the small mountain community where she lives alone with her baby. She gets out her butcher knife, puts Jonathan down, and waits. To her relief, the man turns out to be only a lost traveler with his young daughter.Recently widowed Wayland Jackson, with twelve-year-old daughter Paula, is on his way to Tennessee to practice his profession as a clockmaker. Strong-willed and independent, Collie takes the Jacksons in, steadfastly refusing to identify her baby's father. Wayland's gentleness and humor appeal to her; everything about Collie appeals to him. By mutual consent, he and Paula stay.The collusion is acknowledged by Collie's brothers, who take Wayland along on an exhilarating bear hunt, an initiation ceremony of sorts. On his return, Wayland sets up his clock making business, and he and Collie begin to think of marriage.But peace and contentment come to an end by the sudden appearance late one night at Collie's cabin of her baby's father, precipitating a violent showdown and the promise of further bloodshed--until Collie makes the most painful decision of her life.

Set deep in the Appalachian wilderness between the years of 1779 and 1784, The Land Breakers is a saga like the Norse sagas or the book of Genesis, a story of first and last things, of the violence of birth and death, of inescapable sacrifice and the faltering emergence of community. Mooney and Imy Wright, twenty-one, former indentured servants, long habituated to backbreaking work but not long married, are traveling west. They arrive in a no-account settlement in North Carolina and, on impulse, part with all their savings to acquire a patch of land high in the mountains. With a little livestock and a handful of crude tools, they enter the mountain world-one of transcendent beauty and cruel necessity-and begin to make a world of their own. Mooney and Imy are the first to confront an unsettled country that is sometimes paradise and sometimes hell. They will soon be followed by others. John Ehle is a master of the American language. He has an ear for dialogue and an eye for nature and a grasp of character that have established The Land Breakers as one of the great fictional reckonings with the making of America.

For over twenty-five years Tim Barnwell has explored the southern Appalachian region, documenting the farm culture, visiting with and photographing the people of its isolated mountain enclaves. The photographs in this collection provide a window onto a world that is quickly fading. Barnwell honors the richness and rhythms of everyday life—people in their homes and at work in the fields—and captures the beauty of the North Carolina mountains. These intimate portraits are complemented by oral histories, derived from conversations between the author and his subjects, through which individual stories unfold, rich in humor, joy, loss, and wisdom.

"In The Road John Ehle's skill as a storyteller brings an early episode of road building in the North Carolina mountains to rich and vivid life. Hardship and humor, suffering and dreams are the balance for survival in a landscape that makes harsh demands on its intruders. Ehle lets us experience this place, people, and past in a fully realized novel."—Wilma Dykeman"The Road is a strong novel by one of our most distinguished authors. Muscular, vivid, and pungent, it is broad in historical scope and profound in its human sympathies. We welcome its return with warm pleasure."—Fred ChappellOriginally published in 1967, The Road is epic historical fiction at its best. At the novel's center is Weatherby Wright, a railroad builder who launches an ambitious plan to link the highlands of western North Carolina with the East. As a native of the region, Wright knows what his railway will mean to the impoverished settlers. But to accomplish his grand undertaking he must conquer Sow Mountain, "a massive monolith of earth, rock, vegetation and water, an elaborate series of ridges which built on one another to the top."Wright's struggle to construct the railroad—which requires tall trestles crossing deep ravines and seven tunnels blasted through shale and granite—proves to be much more than an engineering challenge. There is opposition from a child evangelist, who preaches that the railroad is the work of the devil, and there is a serious lack of funds, which forces Wright to use convict labor. How Wright confronts these challenges and how the mountain people respond to the changes the railroad brings to their lives make for powerfully compelling reading.The Author: A native of Asheville, North Carolina, John Ehle has written seventeen novels and works of nonfiction. His books include The Land Breakers, The Journey of August King, The Winter People, and Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. Among the honors he has received are the Lillian Smith Prize and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Award.