In the Merrimack Valley

Jane Brox is the author of five books. In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy is a reissue of her first three books about her family’s farm: Here and Nowhere Else, Five Thousand Days Like This One, and Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.Suzanne Berne is the author of five novels: The Blue Window, The Dogs of Littlefield, The Ghost at the Table, A Perfect Arrangement, and A Crime in the Neighborhood, which won Great Britain’s Orange Prize, now The Women’s Prize. She lives outside of Boston.

Praise for the Merrimack Valley trilogy“Of soil and soul…Family history with a deeper reflection on the connection between land and the people who farm it….Ms. Brox has restored a lost world.”—Wall Street Journal“Arresting. With a poet’s sensibility and an essayist’s search for meaning, Brox gives us keen and sensuous observations of the land…with compassion, honesty, and restraint.”—The Boston Globe“A poignant account of return and recommitment…Brox describes crisply yet with great feeling.”—New York Times Book Review“Tenderly and specifically, generously and with a refreshing breadth of knowledge...recreates the past lyrically and resonantly. Memory is love and cherishing, of course, but also, it is a weighing and giving.”—Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winner“A loving, precisely written evocation of a New England place and its people…reminiscent of Thoreau in its exactness and breadth of implications.”—from the judges’ citation for the L.L. Winship/PEN/New England Award“Brox’s double charged language turns family drama into something bigger [in writing] so arresting that even the most urban reader feels the author’s sense-memory as his own.”—Chicago Tribune“This masterful collage of memoir and history both explodes and reorders the mythos of the American family farm.”—Betty Fussell, author of The Story of Corn“A clear-eyed and beautifully written celebration of a place where family, community, history and nature all still matter deeply. It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything that’s caught and held my attention and admiration quite the way this wonderful memoir of life in the Merrimack Valley has.”—Howard Frank Mosher, author of God’s KingdomPraise for Jane Brox’s Work“Brox writes beautifully…”—New York Times Book Review (front page review)“A wonderfully evocative writer…”—Wall Street Journal