Composed in a series of beautiful web-like sketches, the novel is narrated by a young woman writer who unfolds a New England idyll rooted in friendship, weaving stories and conversations, imagery of sea, skt and earth, the tang of salt air and aromatic herbs into an historically signifigant 'fiction of community' in which themes and form are exquisitly matched. To quote Willa Cather: 'The 'Pointed Fir' sketches are living things caught in the open, with light and freedom and air spaces about them. They melt into the land and the life of the land until they are not stories at all, but life itself.'
