The Great Meadow

First published in 1930 and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, The Great Meadow is a historical novel set in the early days of Kentucky settlement. Intertwined with a flowing romantic saga of young love on the Kentucky trail, are richly painted scenes colonial America. Diony Hall has waited for many years for her betrothed to return to marry her. Trying to fathom the nature of identity and her place in the vast newly created America, Diony spends her time at the family hearthside, combining her love of reading with her roles within the family circle and the daily tasks on the homestead. When Berk Jarvis returns and they are married, they both bid farewell to Virginia, family, community and security to head out to found a new family and a new life together in the wilderness of Kentucky What follows is a breathtaking story of love and death, as the settlers cross the Appalachian mountains and struggle to carve a new life on the unforgiving frontier at the mercy of shortages, harsh winters and the perpetual danger of Indian attack. This astonishing novel, with its rhythmic prose, has too long been forgotten.