With a history of childhood loss and tragedy, Arliss Greene grows up to love his cattle more than his family. The memory of his family’s displacement, due to TVA’s construction of Norris Dam, stays with him as he struggles to make a living farming. His son Daniel tries to distance himself, but an inexplicable attachment to East Tennessee causes him to return to the hilltop where he grew up. He is shocked and disappointed when his wife, Leda, a city girl, ends up working with Arliss, farming the family land. Decisions are made, with repercussions that reverberate throughout their lives, the lives of their children, and the life of the farm from the 1930s to the beginning of the new century.
Written with an unerring ear for the cadence and language of the South, Harvest is a powerful, character-driven novel. A story of family, marriage, farming, baseball, the power of memory, and what sustains people through loss, Harvest is a reckoning of sacrifices and a testament to human resilience.
Catherine Landis, the author of the critically lauded BookSense 76 pick Some Days There’s Pie, has written a compelling new novel with an assured Southern inflection and lovingly rendered three-dimensional characters.