Always Coming Home
Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home is a major work of the imagination from one of America's most respected writers. More than five years in creation, it is a novel unlike any other. A rich and complex interweaving of story and fable, poem, artwork, and music, it totally immerses the reader in the culture of the Kesh, a peaceful people of the far future who inhabit a place called the Valley on the Northern Pacific Coast. The author makes the inhabitants of the valley as familiar, as immediate, as wholly human as our own friends or family. Spiraling outward from the dramatic life story of a woman called Stone Telling, Le Guin's Always Coming Homeinterweaves wry wit, deep insight and extraordinary compassion into a compelling unity of vision.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
16mentions
14people
2018–2026years
50% recommend44% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea, but my favourite of her works is Always Coming Home [1]. Such a rich and varied and humane book.
- I want to plug one of her lesser known books, Always Coming Home. It's set among a tribe of people living in the Bay Area way, way after some apocalypse has erased the memory of our civilization. Much of the book is reports from an anthropologist studying the people.
I think a lot of her books are about how many different ways of life and types of society and culture are possible, and this book is one of her best at bringing you in to another culture.
- I love Always Coming Home so much. It's so rich and creative.
For a shorter story (~50 pages), I'd highly recommend Paradises Lost by her. Many people have written stories about generation ships, but this one is absolutely stunning and truly marvelous.
- Another really beautiful book of hers is Always Coming Home. Check it out sometime!
- Le Guin is a writer who, for me at least, really understands and likes people. Perhaps that relates to her deep knowledge of anthropology, mentioned by others. She also deeply respected indigenous cultures. The two are combined in "Always Coming Home". And if you want a fascinating, multi-perspectival take on racism and slavery, the "story suite" "Five Ways to Forgiveness" is masterful. And of course, the "Earthsea" novels are incredible, and have the best-written dragons I've read. She is just fantastic.
- If you want to get a sense of her mature utopian and anthropological thinking, then read "Always Coming Home". It's not a conventional novel but more of a series of observations on a post-apocalyptic society in California. The framing device is of an anthropological investigator from another time/place interviewing people in the society or hearing their stories and poetry (she also wrote good poetry). It even has accompanying music which she collaborated on with Todd Barton.
Related
Paradises Lost
3 recommend · 3
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Ursula K Le Guin
93 recommend · 206
The Left Hand of Darkness
118 recommend · 214
The Border Trilogy
14 recommend · 22
The Lathe of Heaven
27 recommend · 40
The Dispossessed
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The Other Wind
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