GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont) a witty and gorgeous (The Guardian) novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods

Charming . . . a prescription for summer amusement that takes immediate effect . . . There s so much fine, freewheeling observation and pillowy erudition here, it s tempting just to sink in. The New York Times

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate s words, a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere. And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre perhaps ridiculous local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.