Now in November - Josephine Johnson

Now in November I can see our years as a whole. This autumn is like both an end and a beginning to our lives, and those days which seemed confused with the blur of all things too near and too familiar are clear and strange now.

Forced out of the city by the Depression, Arnold Haldmarne moves his wife and three daughters to the country and tries to scratch a living from the land. After years of unrelenting hard work, the hiring of a young man from a neighbouring farm upsets the fragile balance of their lives. And in the summer, the rains fail to come.

Josephine Johnson, (1910-1990), published eleven works in her lifetime. NOW IN NOVEMBER was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 and is her greatest achievement.

'Very beautiful prose, simple yet bright with imagery and so distinctive that one could mistake no single paragraph for the work of any other writer. Johnson belongs in the tradition of Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson' New York Times Book Review.

'First published in 1934, five years before The Grapes of Wrath, its calm, near Biblical rural voice won the Missouri-born 24-year-old author a deserved Pulitzer Prize' Irish Times.