Sign-In
Cart
The Bountiful Garden
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781450569200
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: Apr 14 2010
Pages: 158
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.37 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
On a November night outside Nashville, Jamison Lucas puts his car into a tree.
He is forty-six. Twenty years earlier he came to this city with a guitar, a new wife, and a conviction that he had something worth hearing. Then Lily was born, and his father sat him down and explained that most artists starve. So Jamison took the sales job. He was good at it. He was good at it for two decades.
What follows the crash is not a hospital room. It is a garden - and a series of strangers who seem to have been expecting him. A grower who talks about soil the way other men talk about scripture. A woman who teaches children in the woods. Each one hands Jamison a piece of a question he stopped asking a long time ago: what were you actually for?
Set against the pastures and back roads of middle Tennessee, The Bountiful Garden is a short, warm, deceptively simple novel about the cost of the practical choice - and about how much of a life can still be planted at the far end of it.
For readers of Theo of Golden, The Shack, and Tuesdays with Morrie.
A note from the authorI published this book in 2009.
In the summer of 2010, I met the man I would marry. He is a music songwriter. publisher and producer in Nashville. His father had encouraged him, years earlier, to go into insurance instead.
We now farm a small acreage outside Franklin, Tennessee. We run a farm store, a field, and a greenhouse. I am sixty-eight and he is seventy, and most days we are failing at something. Our daughter runs a farm and forest school for children - which is to say, she runs a farm santuary I gave to a character in this book.
I did not notice any of this for a long time. Readers noticed it first, and told me.
I have not changed the story. It seemed important to leave it exactly as it was written.
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback