Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

PIANO TIDE

Kathleen Dean Moore

A breathtaking first novel set on the Alaska coast, by a critically acclaimed naturalist and climate activist.

In Piano Tide, the debut novel by award-winning naturalist, philosopher, activist, and author Kathleen Dean Moore, we are introduced to Axel Hagerman, town father in a little village pressed against the mountains in Alaska called Good River Harbor homeland to bears, whales, and a few weather-worn families. Hagerman has made a killing by selling off the spruce, the cedar, the herring, and halibut. But when he decides to export the water from a salmon stream, he runs head-long into young Nora Montgomery, just arrived on the ferry with her piano and her dog.

Nora has burned her bridges in mainland USA, and she aims to disappear into this new homeland, with her piano as her anchor. But when Axel’s next business proposition, a bear pit, turns lethal, Nora has to act. The clash, when it comes, is a spectacular and transformative act of resistance.

Do we belong to the earth or does the earth belong to us? This question, asked two centuries ago by Indian Chief Seath almost two centuries ago, continues to be the defining quandary of the wet, wild rainforests along the shores of the Pacific Northwest. It seethes below the tides of the fictional town.

Filled with music, rainwater, wildlife, and some of the oddest and most affable characters along this far shore, Moore weaves together the fecundity of the tides with a fiercely witty and deeply spirited story about the striving of all creatures for an enduring way of life.

Kathleen Dean Moore is the award-winning author of Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water (Lyons Press 1995); Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World (Lyons Press 2004); The Pine Island Paradox (Milkweed 2004); Wild Comfort (Trumpeter 2010) and most recently Great Tide Rising (Counterpoint 2015).

Available products
Book Published 2016-12-01 by Counterpoint
Book Published 2016-12-01 by Counterpoint

Comments

Piano Tideis a rare beauty, a novel whose deeply flawed characters are written with compassion and insight; a book vibrating with drama and lyrical prose side-by-side with hard-hitting questions that ask how earth—and all life on earth—will survive uncompromising capitalism. Moore introduces the philosophical ‘Problem of Unnecessary Beauty’—why beauty in nature sometimes thrives for no apparent reason. But Piano Tideis anecessary beauty. You may read it in one sitting; but when you turn that last page, you’ll want to stand up for the things we share: this earth, this life, this wild and enduring hope.

I think Kathleen Dean Moore can do anything—including write a savagely funny and deeply insightful novel of the tidepool and rainforest country she knows so well!

This is award-winning naturalist, philosopher, and climate activist Moore’s first foray into fiction, and it is not only a remarkably thoughtful and compelling look at the threats to endangered species and the willful destruction of the environment but also a thoroughly engaging tale featuring vividly drawn characters who grab our interest from the very first pages . . . Moore writes so eloquently and with such passion about the natural world, from tiny tide pool inhabitants to giant grizzlies and towering hemlocks, that she leaves the reader in wonder and awe.

Piano Tide captures with remarkable perception the beauty of Alaska, the environmental conflicts that tear at and unite communities, and the interconnectedness of all things. You’ll be swept into this world as if by a turning tide, and you will love the characters—human and otherwise—you find there.Moore writes from deep knowledge and empathy, with an open heart.

In Piano Tide, Kathleen Dean Moore has given us a an action adventure, a lesson in the natural history of Southeast Alaska, and a cast of unforgettable backwoods characters. As Pacific tides rise and fall, almost engulfing the hamlet called Good River Harbor, we witness humans as well as bears, salmon, and the forest itself, fighting to survive amid forces of man-made destruction and nature’s renewal. Piano Tideis a fine read, sure to join the ranks of Ed Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gangon the eco/thriller bookshelf.

With Piano Tide, Kathleen Dean Moore proves herself the rare writer at home in both the novel and nonfiction. Her debut novel evokes Alaska’s silvery bears and clouds as vividly as her beloved nature writing, with beguiling characters bound by tide and moral compromise in a fishing village at the end of the world. Moore’s story will have you rooting for not only piano-toting Nora, but an entire landscape and all its life. Masterfully told and full of heart, Piano Tideis one of those books you can’t stop thinking about for days after you’ve turned the final page.

Piano Tide joins Ken Kesey’s Sailor Song as one of the great novels of Alaska and its convoluted coast and history. A small group of people making a life in a village by the sea: this is Kathy Moore’s canvas, and she paints a really beautiful, intense, funny and lively portrait of Nora and her new neighbors. How to live in this world? Moore lets us ponder this by way of a great story, in this marvelous debut novel.