"Packed with superb writing." — New York Newsday
“One of the most distinctive voices in American letters today.” — Boston Globe
"In this amazing novel, Dillard has combined her Thoreau-like nature writing with her philisophical/theological way of looking at the world to create a beautiful story of life and love and ultimately death. . . . This is the kind of novel in which you want to linger over the beauty of each sentence and along with Dillard’s characters, contemplate topics like why we love or what are we meant to do with our lives. While the outer story seems so simple, the inner story is incredibly profound." — Cathy Schornstein
“Dillard calls on her erudition as a naturalist and her grace as a poet to create an enthralling story of marriage—particular and universal, larky and monumental.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A superbly written novel. . . . The compact, elliptical narrative will continue to pervade the reader’s consciousness long after the novel ends.” — Kirkus (starred review)
“A rhapsodic novel of our times. . . . In this mythic and transfixing tale, Dillard wryly questions notions of love, exalts in life’s metamorphoses, and celebrates goodness. She casts a spell sensuous and metaphysical.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Annie Dillard is best known her for lyrical observations on nature and philosophy, and she puts those talents to marevelous use in her new novel The Maytrees, a love story that spans four decades and is set on Cape Cod….Dillard takes the most amazing facts and lays them bare for all to see.” — BookPage
“Dillard, a naturalist at heart, poignantly tracks the relationships between Lou and Toby Maytree across 50 years.” — More Magazine
“Glorious.” — The Miami Herald
“In The Maytrees , Dillard creates a beautiful sense of stillness as she details the unencumbered lives of Toby and Lou.” — The Christian Science Monitor
“Annie Dillard gets it right twice in her second novel. As well as being the compelling story of a couple who marry just after World War II, The Maytrees is an ode to the unique, open-skied beauty of Provincetown. . . . Writing about Provincetown, Annie Dillard does the near-impossible: She matches the simple splendor of language to the subtle magnificence of place. And writing about the Maytrees, she captures the entwining and transformation of two people who marry and then grow up.” — The New York Observer
“Dillard has written an elegant metaphor strewn and at the same time beach-funky, philosophically minded, ocean-side love story set on Cape Cod, between the dunes and the star-splashed sky above.” — NPR's All Things Considered
“Dillard’s erudition and her tendency to pose large philosophical and moral questions are in evidence here as in her other works. . . . The Maytrees is a fine book, both in depth of insight and freshness of language . . . by one of our finest contemporary authors.” — The Roanoke Times
“Each paragraph of Dillard’s novel is a thing of beauty, meticulously crafted and vivid, whether expressing the loveliness of a seascape or a man’s inner turmoil.” — Entertainment Weekly
“A gorgeous meditation on one couple’s slog through marriage, separation and reconciliation.” — The Washington Post
“The Maytrees is a soulful exploration of love and marriage that has the hot, sunburned sting of a seaside summer afternoon. . . . Dillard evokes the rich landscape and characters of Cape Cod—its eccentric clam diggers and poets posing as roofers—while centering her story around one family’s moving tragedy.” — People
“Dillard has all she needs in terms of imagination, and she is handy with the witty rejoinders.” — The Chicago Tribune
“Lyrically enthralling. . . . Dillard tells an engaging, subtle tale.” — The Seattle Times
“Dillard’s writing can be as fine as the constellations in a clear night sky.” — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“‘Full of grace’ describes both the story and the way Dillard tells it. Her style is perfectly attuned to her material—quirky, sometimes near archaic in its rhythms and language, plain-spoken but lyrical. . . . You may not come away from this novel with all the answers about love and marriage, but with Dillard as guide, you will begin to know the important questions.” — The Hartford Courant
“Dillard’s lush, perfect prose paints a winning portrait of these artistic, opinionated, strong-willed characters who love books, love words, embrace life. . . . Time and love parade before us in The Maytrees, in all their glory. . . . This warm enveloping tale enfolds us like a caress.” — The New Orleans Times-Picayune
“The Maytrees showcases all the reasons people worship Dillard. . . . The Maytrees has elegant, evocative language. It describes nature in a way that would enchant the most hardened city dweller. And it captures the mystery of love, maternal as well as romantic. This novel is a treasure. . . . Dillard writes so beautifully about the ocean, the clouds, the stars, the bogs and the sand that the landscape becomes the most memorable character of this novel. . . . The Maytrees is the perfect beach book for the serious reader.” — USA Today
“Exquisite. . . . Few American writers can describe the ecology of a region quite like Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard. In her slim, poetic new novel, The Maytrees , she turns those descriptive muscles on a man and a woman—lovers—bound by their commitment and the landscape against which their rocky affair unfolded. . . . The Maytrees follows their courtship, romance and early marriage with a fine-tuned eye and an amusing ear.” — John Freeman, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A meditation on love and forgiveness.” — The Wall Street Journal
“Wonderful. . . . Annie Dillard is a writer of unusual range, generosity, and ambition. . . . Her prose is bracingly intelligent, lovely, and humane. . . . Dazzling. . . . The Maytrees is a love story of an unusually adult and contemporary kind.” — Margot Livesey, The Boston Globe
“Dillard’s poetic descriptions seem to grow up out of the sand and seafoam, and the images she puts into your mind, playfully rendered and wonderfully precise, are spellbinding. Ultimately, this is a story of great tenderness.” — The Arizona Republic
“In the union of Toby and Lou Maytree we see what could be the ideal marriage: companionship, intimacy, contentment, and love that needs no words. But amid all this reassurance and coziness, the Maytrees’ lives are turned upside down. . . . Then this becomes a story of survival and repose, of a mother and son finding peace for themselves.” — Elle
“Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love. . . . The author also weaves recurring images and themes through the narrative with supreme grace. . . . As in all of Ms. Dillard’s writing, transcendent moments abound. ” — The New York Times
“Dillard’s novel, about a torturous affair, captures the solitude of Provincetown in spare descriptions of character and landscape.” — New York Magazine
“A simple, elegant tale. . . . Thought and solitude and the mystery of being, death and love and the sea, dwell at the center of this spare and graceful novel.” — The San Diego Union-Tribune
“The charm here is in the telling. . . . Dillard’s look at love and distance is engagingly intimate.” — Boston Magazine
“[F]ull of the kind of pleasures one looks for in fiction. . . . The novel as a whole is beautiful, and the beauty is never digressive or ornamental. . . . This is where Dillard’s imagination has always lived, in the stark and lyrical awareness of the profundity of the physical world.” — Washington Post Book World
“Gorgeous. . . . Deeply meditative. . . . One of the most lucid and effective books Dillard has ever produced. Certainly one of the most affecting. . . . A novel of almost drastic austerity.” — Slate
“Annie Dillard is, was and always will be the very best at describing the landscapes in which we find ourselves. The Maytrees is as much an exegesis on love and time as it is the story of a marriage. . . . There is no denying that when you have finished this slim book, you have looked over a jewel and seen its beauty.” — The Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A spare and subtle novel. . . . Like Thoreau, Dillard takes us to that place of rugged independence, that struggle of making a living without forfeiting the mind.” — The Chicago Sun-Times
“Intelligent and poetic. . . . Dillard’s prose is rich, as is her dive into the too-often-shallow waters of love and deception. . . . The Maytrees will not disappoint.” — The Rocky Mountain News
“A very good book. . . . Nobody writes nature better than Annie Dillard. There’s nobody more alive to the nuances of its pulsing (and sometimes menacing) fecundity. In The Maytrees, the sand dunes and waves of Cape Cod function almost as characters. . . . Dillard seems incapable of writing a bad or graceless sentence; this novel is full of beautifully concise sentences that convey precisely what they need to convey without drawing undue attention to themselves.” — The Globe and Mail
“Breathtakingly illuminative. . . . Beautifully told. . . . Dillard has accomplished the reader’s payoff she so relentlessly detailed almost 20 years ago in The Writing Life . She too has pressed upon us ‘the deepest mysteries.’” — The New York Times Book Review
“Bracingly intelligent, lovely, and humane. . . . Dazzling. . . . The Maytrees is a love story of an unusually adult and contemporary kind.” — Margot Livesey, The Boston Globe
“A reservoir of oceanic language, thrilling and sophisticated assumptions of reader intelligence and elegantly lean descriptive detail. . . . Dillard knows how to create Eden on the page . . . exquisite.” — Los Angeles Book Review
“Dillard’s examination of all manner of human interactions is nuanced, and her evocation of Cape Cod is at once precise and gorgeous.” — The Atlantic
“Poignant. . . . Dillard, like the best of naturalists, creates memorable poetic images. . . . If the purpose of literature is to teach us how to live, Dillard has succeeded.” — The Houston Chronicle
“A book worth pondering. Its seeming simplicity is seductive enough to draw the reader into the questions that Dillard poses and then to strike with unexpected emotional power. Once again, Dillard takes on the big questions of life, love and meaning in a fresh and intriguing way.” — The Christian Century
“The Maytrees is a quiet masterpiece. . . . Dillard’s prose slips from the natural to the human with quicksilver grace. . . . Life by sea and starlight is simple and rich, conveyed by Dillard with Thoreau’s eye for the natural world. . . . As well as Herman Melville, something of Dillard’s great Catholic compatriot Flannery O’Connor is there in her unremitting sense of both doom and wonder, in the beauty of her prose and the boldness of her structure.” — The Financial Times
“In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Miss Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel.” — The Washington Times
“In The Maytrees Dillard remains nominally loyal to those values that make her earlier writings both disturbing and rewarding: patience, the attention to particularity, the emptying of the self, and the submission of the will to necessity.” — The London Review of Books
One of the most distinctive voices in American letters today.
"In this amazing novel, Dillard has combined her Thoreau-like nature writing with her philisophical/theological way of looking at the world to create a beautiful story of life and love and ultimately death. . . . This is the kind of novel in which you want to linger over the beauty of each sentence and along with Dillard’s characters, contemplate topics like why we love or what are we meant to do with our lives. While the outer story seems so simple, the inner story is incredibly profound."
In The Maytrees , Dillard creates a beautiful sense of stillness as she details the unencumbered lives of Toby and Lou.
The Christian Science Monitor
A rhapsodic novel of our times. . . . In this mythic and transfixing tale, Dillard wryly questions notions of love, exalts in life’s metamorphoses, and celebrates goodness. She casts a spell sensuous and metaphysical.
Booklist (starred review)
Annie Dillard is best known her for lyrical observations on nature and philosophy, and she puts those talents to marevelous use in her new novel The Maytrees, a love story that spans four decades and is set on Cape Cod….Dillard takes the most amazing facts and lays them bare for all to see.
Dillard, a naturalist at heart, poignantly tracks the relationships between Lou and Toby Maytree across 50 years.
Glorious.
"Packed with superb writing."
Dillard’s writing can be as fine as the constellations in a clear night sky.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
[F]ull of the kind of pleasures one looks for in fiction. . . . The novel as a whole is beautiful, and the beauty is never digressive or ornamental. . . . This is where Dillard’s imagination has always lived, in the stark and lyrical awareness of the profundity of the physical world.
Washington Post Book World
Dillard’s lush, perfect prose paints a winning portrait of these artistic, opinionated, strong-willed characters who love books, love words, embrace life. . . . Time and love parade before us in The Maytrees, in all their glory. . . . This warm enveloping tale enfolds us like a caress.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune
The charm here is in the telling. . . . Dillard’s look at love and distance is engagingly intimate.
Intelligent and poetic. . . . Dillard’s prose is rich, as is her dive into the too-often-shallow waters of love and deception. . . . The Maytrees will not disappoint.
Breathtakingly illuminative. . . . Beautifully told. . . . Dillard has accomplished the reader’s payoff she so relentlessly detailed almost 20 years ago in The Writing Life . She too has pressed upon us ‘the deepest mysteries.’
The New York Times Book Review
Bracingly intelligent, lovely, and humane. . . . Dazzling. . . . The Maytrees is a love story of an unusually adult and contemporary kind.
A simple, elegant tale. . . . Thought and solitude and the mystery of being, death and love and the sea, dwell at the center of this spare and graceful novel.
The San Diego Union-Tribune
A book worth pondering. Its seeming simplicity is seductive enough to draw the reader into the questions that Dillard poses and then to strike with unexpected emotional power. Once again, Dillard takes on the big questions of life, love and meaning in a fresh and intriguing way.
‘Full of grace’ describes both the story and the way Dillard tells it. Her style is perfectly attuned to her material—quirky, sometimes near archaic in its rhythms and language, plain-spoken but lyrical. . . . You may not come away from this novel with all the answers about love and marriage, but with Dillard as guide, you will begin to know the important questions.
A meditation on love and forgiveness.
Annie Dillard is, was and always will be the very best at describing the landscapes in which we find ourselves. The Maytrees is as much an exegesis on love and time as it is the story of a marriage. . . . There is no denying that when you have finished this slim book, you have looked over a jewel and seen its beauty.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune
In the union of Toby and Lou Maytree we see what could be the ideal marriage: companionship, intimacy, contentment, and love that needs no words. But amid all this reassurance and coziness, the Maytrees’ lives are turned upside down. . . . Then this becomes a story of survival and repose, of a mother and son finding peace for themselves.
Dillard has all she needs in terms of imagination, and she is handy with the witty rejoinders.
In The Maytrees Dillard remains nominally loyal to those values that make her earlier writings both disturbing and rewarding: patience, the attention to particularity, the emptying of the self, and the submission of the will to necessity.
The London Review of Books
A spare and subtle novel. . . . Like Thoreau, Dillard takes us to that place of rugged independence, that struggle of making a living without forfeiting the mind.
Lyrically enthralling. . . . Dillard tells an engaging, subtle tale.
The Maytrees is a soulful exploration of love and marriage that has the hot, sunburned sting of a seaside summer afternoon. . . . Dillard evokes the rich landscape and characters of Cape Cod—its eccentric clam diggers and poets posing as roofers—while centering her story around one family’s moving tragedy.
Poignant. . . . Dillard, like the best of naturalists, creates memorable poetic images. . . . If the purpose of literature is to teach us how to live, Dillard has succeeded.
The Maytrees is a quiet masterpiece. . . . Dillard’s prose slips from the natural to the human with quicksilver grace. . . . Life by sea and starlight is simple and rich, conveyed by Dillard with Thoreau’s eye for the natural world. . . . As well as Herman Melville, something of Dillard’s great Catholic compatriot Flannery O’Connor is there in her unremitting sense of both doom and wonder, in the beauty of her prose and the boldness of her structure.
Annie Dillard gets it right twice in her second novel. As well as being the compelling story of a couple who marry just after World War II, The Maytrees is an ode to the unique, open-skied beauty of Provincetown. . . . Writing about Provincetown, Annie Dillard does the near-impossible: She matches the simple splendor of language to the subtle magnificence of place. And writing about the Maytrees, she captures the entwining and transformation of two people who marry and then grow up.
Gorgeous. . . . Deeply meditative. . . . One of the most lucid and effective books Dillard has ever produced. Certainly one of the most affecting. . . . A novel of almost drastic austerity.
A very good book. . . . Nobody writes nature better than Annie Dillard. There’s nobody more alive to the nuances of its pulsing (and sometimes menacing) fecundity. In The Maytrees, the sand dunes and waves of Cape Cod function almost as characters. . . . Dillard seems incapable of writing a bad or graceless sentence; this novel is full of beautifully concise sentences that convey precisely what they need to convey without drawing undue attention to themselves.
Each paragraph of Dillard’s novel is a thing of beauty, meticulously crafted and vivid, whether expressing the loveliness of a seascape or a man’s inner turmoil.
Dillard’s poetic descriptions seem to grow up out of the sand and seafoam, and the images she puts into your mind, playfully rendered and wonderfully precise, are spellbinding. Ultimately, this is a story of great tenderness.
A gorgeous meditation on one couple’s slog through marriage, separation and reconciliation.
Dillard’s erudition and her tendency to pose large philosophical and moral questions are in evidence here as in her other works. . . . The Maytrees is a fine book, both in depth of insight and freshness of language . . . by one of our finest contemporary authors.
Dillard’s novel, about a torturous affair, captures the solitude of Provincetown in spare descriptions of character and landscape.
Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love. . . . The author also weaves recurring images and themes through the narrative with supreme grace. . . . As in all of Ms. Dillard’s writing, transcendent moments abound.
Dillard has written an elegant metaphor strewn and at the same time beach-funky, philosophically minded, ocean-side love story set on Cape Cod, between the dunes and the star-splashed sky above.
NPR's All Things Considered
In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Miss Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel.
A reservoir of oceanic language, thrilling and sophisticated assumptions of reader intelligence and elegantly lean descriptive detail. . . . Dillard knows how to create Eden on the page . . . exquisite.
Dillard’s examination of all manner of human interactions is nuanced, and her evocation of Cape Cod is at once precise and gorgeous.
The Maytrees showcases all the reasons people worship Dillard. . . . The Maytrees has elegant, evocative language. It describes nature in a way that would enchant the most hardened city dweller. And it captures the mystery of love, maternal as well as romantic. This novel is a treasure. . . . Dillard writes so beautifully about the ocean, the clouds, the stars, the bogs and the sand that the landscape becomes the most memorable character of this novel. . . . The Maytrees is the perfect beach book for the serious reader.
Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love. . . . The author also weaves recurring images and themes through the narrative with supreme grace. . . . As in all of Ms. Dillard’s writing, transcendent moments abound.
Gorgeous. . . . Deeply meditative. . . . One of the most lucid and effective books Dillard has ever produced. Certainly one of the most affecting. . . . A novel of almost drastic austerity.
The Maytrees showcases all the reasons people worship Dillard. . . . The Maytrees has elegant, evocative language. It describes nature in a way that would enchant the most hardened city dweller. And it captures the mystery of love, maternal as well as romantic. This novel is a treasure. . . . Dillard writes so beautifully about the ocean, the clouds, the stars, the bogs and the sand that the landscape becomes the most memorable character of this novel. . . . The Maytrees is the perfect beach book for the serious reader.
Annie Dillard dives headlong into the deep, unfathomable mystery of married love in this lyrical novel -- only the second of her long, distinguished career. Set largely on the windswept tip of Cape Cod amid rolling tides and drifting dunes, the story is simplicity itself: A man and woman meet in postwar Provincetown, fall in love, marry, and have a child. Years later, one leaves the other in a bewildering act of betrayal that tests but does not break their transcendent bond; later still, their lives intersect again in an unanticipated twist of fate. For all its brevity and simplicity, The Maytrees is not an easy, breezy read. Filled with the deliciously elliptical language and breathtaking descriptions of the natural world that have earned Dillard comparisons to Thoreau and William Blake, this is a story to be savored -- slowly, languorously, and with careful attention to every gorgeous detail.
The good news is that in The Maytrees, despite the big words and the name-dropping…there is also good old straight narrative and prose that is often, yes, breathtakingly illuminative. Most important, in the book's central couple, Lou and Toby Maytree, as well as their motley group of Cape Cod friends, she gives us actual characters. In The Writing Life, there is no one (if we don't count the endless dead writers) but a stunt pilot she flies with in the last chapter to break the monotony of the mind…There, the endless musings are all her own, but here they are in the mouths of other peopleblessedly quirky, funny, interesting other people… They are not only enough to save the bookfrom the author herself, in a waybut they are also infused with such life that they make it a near great one. The New York Times Book Review
Dillard has always been fascinated by time -- by the fact that existence is charged with it, saturated with it, borne along by it into a future that makes the span of any life less than negligible. And time in its mystery and grandeur bestrides this novel. Its sea is wild and generative, its sky orders the constellations, and both are primordial, archaic, full of the fact of time past and persisting, unchanging, changing everything. If there were such a thing as cosmic realism, The Maytrees would be a classic of the genre. The Washington Post
As in all of Ms. Dillard’s writing, transcendent moments abound. And the last line of The Maytrees is so lovely that it may send you right back to the book’s beginning. The New York Times
David Rasche's reading of Annie Dillard's lovely new novel is the epitome of serene. He appropriately treats this tale of love lost and regained with calm attention and stillness. However, the combination of his deliberate and thoughtful reading, similar to the way many poets read their poetry, and Dillard's spare and elegant prose may not be for everyone. Add to the mix the soothing sounds of the Windham Hillesque piano pieces that open and close each disc and a listener may be lulled into an almost meditative state or beyond. This audio experience is like floating on ocean swells as the surf roars in the distance: powerful, mesmerizing and relaxing. In a way, it is the perfect beach book: listen as you soak in the sun's rays and drift in and out of the finely crafted, lithe narrative. Be warned, however: this vast and loving epic may not be suitable listening for a tired driver with a long night's journey ahead. Simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 5). (July)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Pulitzer Prize winner Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ) is best known for her nonfiction; this 11th book, set on Cape Cod, is a fictional account of a broken family. The plot follows the courtship and marriage of Toby Maytree and Lou Bigelow, who fall in love and settle near Provincetown shortly after World War II. Good-looking, unconventional, and brainy, Toby and Lou share an intense appreciation of the natural world—the Cape's wild sand dunes are major players in the novel—yet husband and wife live most vividly within their own minds, a trait strongly reflected in Pete, their only child. When Toby impulsively leaves with another woman to settle in Maine, none of the Maytrees really knows how to cope. Many years pass before tragedy propels them to achieve reunion and redemption based on selfless love. The poetic language, close observations of nature, and moving, family-centered theme in this short, low-key novel should appeal to a wide readership. Recommended for most fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/07.] Starr E. Smith
An anthropologist's eye and a poet's precision distinguish this superbly written novel, exploring the ritual complexities of life, love and death. In only her second novel (after The Living, 1992), the Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist/memoirist (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974, etc.) provides a portrait of a relationship as it weathers the decades and endures twists and turns both unexpected and common. In almost fairy-tale fashion, Dillard details the romance in Cape Cod's Provincetown between Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree, who seem fated to fall in love. She's beautiful, though as Toby and the reader learn, she's so much more. He's a few years older, an aspiring poet, and initially tongue-tied and dumbstruck around Lou. They marry and have a son whom they both adore. Life is perfect-perhaps too perfect. Maybe people who idealize each other to such an extent can't know each other too well. Not only do Toby and Lou surprise themselves, they surprise their tightly knit community, whose quirky characters are themselves full of surprises. Little goes as Toby and Lou had planned when they were younger and enraptured. Twenty years after one of them betrays the other and moves to Maine, they ultimately reunite, on an even deeper level than what they had earlier known. With a penchant for alliteration and a refusal to pass moral judgments, Dillard renders her characters as flawed humans trying to make sense of the lives they are living but cannot understand. In the process, she examines the essence of beauty and the nature of death, the fate that all her characters face and the common denominator that perhaps defines each of them. The compact, elliptical narrative will continue to pervade thereader's consciousness long after the novel ends.
Dillard (PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK) brings her renowned skills as a naturalist to their full height in this lush character study of a young couple in post-war Provincetown in a story that moves through their meeting, marriage, separation, reunion, and deaths. Who loves more, men or women, characters muse early on. And do they love differently? Listeners will be as enchanted by these unconventional lovers as they will be by the waves and stars that seem to give their lives a reason to continue. Secondary characters merge with the ever-changing landscape, offering shades of light or dark. Narrator David Rasche keeps all the elements on an even course, not falling prey to moments of possible overemotion. R.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine