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An evocative and engrossing collection of new stories and a novella about women experiencing life's challenges and beauty from the award-winning writer Megan Mayhew Bergman.
A recently separated woman fills a huge terrarium with endangered flowers to establish a small world only she can control in an attempt to heal her broken heart. A competitive swimmer negotiates over which days she will fulfill her wifely duties, and which days she will keep for herself. A peach farmer wonders if her orchard will survive a drought. And generations of a family in South Carolina struggle with fidelity and their cruel past, some clinging to old ways and others painfully carving new paths.
In these haunting stories, Megan Mayhew Bergman portrays women who wrestle with problematic inheritances: a modern glass house on a treacherous California cliff, a water-starved ranch, and an abandoned plantation on a river near Charleston. Bergman's provocative prose asks the questions: what are we leaving behind for our descendants to hold, and what price will they pay for our mistakes?
"Bergman's stories are so atmospherically and emotionally rich that they serve as portals into distinct interior worlds...this collection is distinct and vivid, each story burrowing inside the reader's brain to leave an indelible mark. As singular as it is atmospheric." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"These are stories you want to live in...In a collection perfectly suited for our moment, Bergman examines what remains of what was given to us and suggests how we might move on as the world continues to change around us." - Booklist (starred review)
"An alluring collection centered on women grappling with their circumstances...Bergman emboldens her characters with wit and a shimmering sense of self-awareness. Her attention to details is uncanny...Though alienated from the lives they either once enjoyed or from the futures they yearn for, the characters demonstrate immense mettle. Bergman's fans will savor each story." - Publishers Weekly
"Mayhew Bergman is one of the best authors out there for chronicling our tangled, intimate, complicated relationship to the natural world; her elegant, lyrical prose documents an evolving crisis and our incorrigibly human responses to it." - Lit Hub
"An extraordinary, unnerving, and beautiful book. Bergman writes with preternatural wisdom, delivering urgent stories of radical independence and toughness in a world on fire. Like the women who helm them, these stories are ornery and fierce—ready for battle, their teeth filed to points." - Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer finalist for The Great Believers
"Heartfelt, rich in character and detail, the stories in How Strange a Season feel both modern and timeless." - Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne
"A gorgeous collection featuring strong women, or women on their way to becoming strong, often while aiming to do some good. There is an atmosphere here—a kind of skewed quality that makes many of these stories disquieting. And that a storied Southern home could be cursed instead of blessed—this kind of overturned belief abounds in these beautifully written stories." - Amy Hempel, author of Sing to It
This information about How Strange a Season was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Bo Bergman
Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of three books, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and How Strange a Season. She is currently writing a book on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
Megan is a journalist, essayist, and critic. She has written columns on climate change and the natural world for the Guardian and the Paris Review. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Orion, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2011 and 2015, and on NPR's Selected Shorts. She was awarded the Garrett Award for Fiction and the Phil Reed Environmental Writing Award for Journalism, and, previously, fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the American Library in Paris....
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