Country Place: A Novel

by Ann Petry

Overview

“Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose.” — Tayari Jones, New York Times Book Review

From the author of the bestselling novel The Street, Ann Petry’s classic 1947 novel portrays a small, sleepy New England town grappling with the indignities and lies of American life.

Johnnie Roane has come home from four years of fighting in World War II to his loving parents and his beautiful wife, Gloria. But his first doubts of Gloria’s infidelity are created on the way home by the local taxi driver, a passionate gossip, and these doubts which mature with the hurricane that is bearing down on them darkening the seemingly perfect town of Lennox, Connecticut. But a greater violence lurks beneath the surface of the storm…Country Place is a classic, page-turning story that masterfully captures the transformation of small-town life in America from one of the twentieth century’s finest writers.

“I’ve recently had my brain re-wired by Ann Petry, and it’s that exhilarating feeling of falling in love with one of your lifetime writers for the first time.” —Brandon Tyler

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063260092
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/10/2023
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	628,121
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Ann Petry was the acclaimed author of the adult novel The Street, a groundbreaking literary work about life in Harlem, which sold over a million copies. She also wrote several books for young readers, including Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, the story of the courageous and heroic woman who struggled and fought for her people before and during the Civil War.

Editorial Reviews

Gossip, malice, calculation, infidelity, adultery, attempted murder, sudden death, and a set of surprise bequests that more or less straighten things out—these are some of the dominant matters treated in Country Place. Yet this is, despite the violence of its events, a quiet book, carefully and economically phrased, and a good deal different from the author’s best-selling The Street.”  — Richard Sullivan, New York Times, 1947

“This neglected tour de force is a startling departure.” — Keith Clark, author of The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry

“Petry will always feel on time. Her kind of talent will always feel startling and sui generis: The music of her sentences, and their discipline; her unerring sense of psychology; the fullness with which she endows each character, which must be understood as a kind of love; the plots that commandeer whole hours and days. . . . Her work endures not only because it illuminates reality, but because it harnesses the power of fiction to supplant it.” — Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

From the Publisher

Gossip, malice, calculation, infidelity, adultery, attempted murder, sudden death, and a set of surprise bequests that more or less straighten things out—these are some of the dominant matters treated in Country Place. Yet this is, despite the violence of its events, a quiet book, carefully and economically phrased, and a good deal different from the author’s best-selling The Street.” 

Richard Sullivan

In Country Place (1947), Ann Petry dared to violate an unofficial literary commandment of her era: African American writers shall confine their creative vision to racial protest, chronicling black suffering in the service of solving the so-called 'Negro Problem.' Petry flips the racial script, depicting a nearly all-white, deceptively tranquil hamlet resembling her native Saybrook, Connecticut...this neglected tour de force is a startling departure.

Keith Clark

Pettry will always feel on time. Her kind of talent will always feel startling and sui generis: The music of her sentences, and their discipline; her unerring sense of psychology; the fullness with which she endows each character, which must be understood as a kind of love; the plots that commandeer whole hours and days. . . . Her work endures not only because it illuminates reality, but because it harnesses the power of fiction to supplant it.

Parul Sehgal