Country People by Daniel Mason is a 320 page standalone novel to be published by Random House on July 7, 2026.

Genre

Literary Fiction

Blurb

A rollicking work of lyricism and humor, about one family’s tumble into the unknown, from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of North Woods

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales, and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, “a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in a “Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

Opening Line

…And so my path descended, through the twisting caverns.

My Thoughts

“I…asserted that the world was mad, and the world said, that I was mad, and confound them, they outvoted me.” ~Nathaniel Lee, 17th century English dramatist

Country People by Daniel Mason, author of one of my top reads of 2023, North Woods, brings readers along on the journey of one year in the life of the Krzelewski-Petrosian family. The parents are in academia, 45 year old Miles still “working on” his dissertation, the topic of which he has changed several times, when Kate gets offered a visiting faculty position across the country. They pack up their two children and the family dog and leave California for a new home in the Green Mountain area of Vermont.

The narration in this book is quite funny. As an example, when the family first cannot resist stopping at every roadside farmstand they pass,

[they] soon found themselves in possession of more zucchini than they had ever been in possession of in their lives, one of those milestones a person passes without fanfare, but a milestone nonetheless.

There is plenty about country life that surprises these Californian transplants, mostly to their delight. Miles’ current dissertation topic involves Russian folktales, having most recently been changed from Russian peasants in the works of Tolstoy. For the purposes of his research, surely the good people of rural Vermont count as being like peasants? Maybe?

Despite his awareness that flat-earthers existed, Miles had never actually met a live one. He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d expected, but it was someone more superficially brain-damaged than Hugh, who, for all his looseness with the world of facts, had seemed, until that point, more like a run-of-the-mill mansplainer in his late-forties. But Miles had apparently been living in a bubble, because here was a person with all his teeth, sensible sun protection, and an alpenstock, now holding forth on Pythagoras, ring laser gyroscopes, and the 2017 solar eclipse. Except, he realized after a while, Hugh wasn’t a flat-earther, Hugh was a hollow-earther, and his disdain for flat-earthers seemed to match even his disdain for the general population who believed the world was solid at its core.

Wow, taking it to another level, thought Miles.

The exciting part was that neither Kate nor Miles, in all their lives, had known this was something a person, a nonmedieval person, could believe, that it was even part of the great stock of possible beliefs. But here it was! And Hugh, who took encouragement from the stunned general silence of these hikers, who were now beginning to doubt not only his credibility regarding snakes and wildflowers, but also their personal safety, expressed surprise that no one else had heard this theory, actually two theories, one that held there was both an Inside and an Outside of the Shell, and another that there was only an Inside, and on the outside was the Void.

The story follows the imperfect but highly relatable Miles, devoted husband and father, as he finds himself slipping into the doldrums of otherwise having no professional purpose of his own and failing to meet expectations. For a time he finds solace in hiking through the woods, zen in scything crops with another failed academic husband in the area, joy in learning to ski along the snowy mountainsides. Winter puts the first two on pause, while a knee injury halts the last one.

It’s then that Miles finds a feeling of community in the most unexpected of places. He befriends an eclectic ensemble of locals who all share a belief in a rather fantastic legend lifted from the alleged writings of a man who claimed to have descended into nearby cave systems so far that he stumbled upon another world, a veritable paradise within the Earth’s core. It almost doesn’t matter to Miles that he does not share this specific belief; a man went into a cave and perhaps saw something, but the magic to him is the enthusiasm among the group of people who gather to discuss the story and their research into its different facets, and the sense of belonging they extend to him.

Honestly, it did take me somewhere between 15-20% of the book before I settled in and stopped asking “What is this, exactly?” and started to really enjoy it. It’s a bit difficult to put into words what exactly it’s about, but I can confidently say that it is witty and well-written literary fiction. I’ll borrow from the blurb on Goodreads, because I find it quite accurate: “Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.” Well done!

Thanks, NetGalley and Random House, for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Goodreads