Always Coming Home

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award nominee 1986.

This book is a richly imaginative story of a people of a far distant time discovered on the Pacific coast. With spellbinding mastery of magic realism and wonderfully convincing detail, Le Guin has brought to life the Valley and its people, the Kesh, presenting to us their lives, histories, adventures, customs, literature, language, and art – sometimes in their own words, sometimes in the descriptions and interpretations of an observant but wondering ethnologist. The result is a complex and dynamic interweaving of everyday life and elaborate ceremony, descriptions of a war and recipes for lamb soup, satires, lyrics, wordplay, technology, poetry, drama, meditations, gossip, and romances, interrelated to form an increasingly fascinating whole.

Through it all runs, as the river runs through the Valley, one of the most poignant and compelling narratives Le Guin has ever written, the life story of the woman named Stone Telling. Child of a woman of the quiet towns of the Valley and a captain of an invading force from an aggressive people of the north, Stone Telling must seek her peace among both peoples in a journey which forms the adventure of her life, the subject of her story, and the moving and dramatic center of the book.