Pages : 525
Overall Mark : 6/10
A long, long time from now, in the valleys of what will no longer be called Northern California, might be going to have lived a people called the Kesh.
But Always Coming Home is not the story of the Kesh. Rather it is the stories of the Kesh. Stories, poems, songs, recipes – Always Coming Home is no less than an anthropological account of a community that does not yet exist, a tour de force of imaginative fiction by one of modern literature’s greatest voices.
URSULA K. LE GUIN (1929-)
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the finest writers of our time. Her books have attracted millions of devoted readers and won many awards, including the National Book Award, the Hugo and Nebula Awards and a Newbery Honour. Among her novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and the six books of Earthsea have already attained undisputed classic status. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
VERDICT
It’s hard to judge this as a novel as it is more of a fictional anthropological guide to a made-up society. Le Guin does an awesome job of creating a world from the basic elements right up to the most important parts, but it is quite the challenge to wrap your mind around. There are stories interspersed between studies of the Kesh, but these are few and far between and just as hard to read as the rest of the book. It’s worth the effort to some extent, but it’s inaccessibility makes it more of an oddity than a must read.
