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Treeborne

A Novel

Caleb Johnson

Picador

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ISBN10: 1250169100
ISBN13: 9781250169105

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320 Pages

$24.00

CA$32.50

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Janie Treeborne lives on an orchard at the edge of Elberta, Alabama, and in time, she has become its keeper. A place where conquistadors once walked, and where the peaches they left behind now grow, Elberta has seen fierce battles, violent storms, and frantic change—and when the town is once again threatened from without, Janie realizes it won’t withstand much more. So she tells the story of its people: of Hugh, her granddaddy, determined to preserve Elberta’s legacy at any cost; of his wife, Maybelle, the postmaster, whose sudden death throws the town into chaos; of her lover, Lee Malone, a black orchardist harvesting from a land where he is less than welcome; of the time when Janie kidnapped her own Hollywood-obsessed aunt and tore the wrong people apart.

As the world closes in on Elberta, Caleb Johnson’s debut novel lifts the veil and offers one last glimpse. Treeborne is a celebration and a reminder: of how the past gets mixed up in thoughts of the future; of how home is a story as much as a place.

Reviews

Praise for Treeborne

"[Treeborne] is deeply rooted in the Southern literature tradition, peopled with eccentric characters and spiked with a dash of the gothic . . . In vivid and often lyrical language, [Johnson] affirms that, for some, geography and destiny are inevitably joined."Asheville Citizen-Times

"In Treeborne, Caleb Johnson spins an artful, intricate web of a place—its rich history and memorable characters caught and held there by stories told and secrets withheld. Suspenseful and immensely satisfying."—Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life

"Treeborne is a remarkable first novel: poetic, funny, and populated by particular, fully alive characters. Caleb Johnson has a wonderful ear for the rhythm and diction of Southern voices. He knows how to light on just the right detail of place, time and person. Watching how the intertwined interests of the land, of the past, and of a family play out makes the novel compelling from start to finish."—Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others and Stone Arabia

“Caleb Johnson is as much a prophet of his place and time as was Larry Brown of north Mississippi, as Cormac McCarthy of his native Knoxville, Tennessee, Marquez of his homegrown, fictional Macondo. He is Treeborne. This is a novel born of a deep, affectionate, and wise knowledge of a place and its people, its history, and its rich and complicated wildness. And its innate tendency to recognize and heighten the mysterious and strange in the ordinary, everyday. He manipulates and maneuvers narrative masterfully.”—Brad Watson, author of Miss Jane

"In his debut novel, Johnson has conjured a stunning account of the Treeborne family of Elberta, Alabama, creating an immersive sense of both time and place as he probes the memories and resentments that linger among the town's residents over the course of decades . . . Majestic in scope, jam-packed with revelations and a touch of the fantastical, Treeborne is an enthralling story about what binds people together and breaks them apart."Booklist (Starred Review)

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

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Stories We Tell

TODAY


The water was coming, but Janie Treeborne would not leave. She’d lived alone in this house perched on the edge of a roadside peach orchard in Elberta, Alabama, ever since Lee Malone sold it to her....

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About the author

Caleb Johnson

CALEB JOHNSON is the author of the novel Treeborne. He grew up in Arley, AL, studied journalism at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and earned an MFA from the University of Wyoming. Johnson has worked as a newspaper reporter, a janitor and a whole-animal butcher, among other jobs. He has been awarded a Jentel Writing Residency and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in fiction to the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He lives with his wife, Irina, and their dog, Hugo, in Valle Crucis, NC, where he teaches at Appalachian State University while working on his next novel.

Irina Zhorov