Searoad

By: Ursula K. Le Guin

'A vision of multiplicity and endless change and continuity' Los Angeles Times

'Rich, warm, and as easy on the soul as an afternoon on the beach' Kirkus

Searoad is a sandy track that runs between the town of Klatsand and the rugged Oregon coast.

Across this stretch, locals with roots in the town overlap with visitors staying in its run-down motels: a man questions his wife's desire to be a poet; a summering librarian indulges in an affair; a waitress recalls the shooting of her teenage daughter by her own husband. And always, women walk on the long, long beach.

And as the narrative shifts from the horizontal present to the vertical past, a four-generation chain of mothers and daughters reaches back to Klatsand's beginnings - and forward to its future.

In Searoad, trailblazing feminist author Ursula K. Le Guin paints a vivid and powerfully evocative portrait of a small community built over the course of a century.©1991 The Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust (P)2026 Orion Publishing Group Limited

Critic reviews

Searoad is a collection of realist stories that edges boldly into enriching borders of myth

Rich, warm, and as easy on the soul as an afternoon on the beach

A vision of multiplicity and endless change and continuity

Many of the tales center around women drawn together in threes - mother, daughter, grandmother - by illness or death. Passionate, independent and questioning, these characters generally choose, sooner or later, personal freedom over convention, but not without pain . . . Idiosyncratic and convincing, LeGuin's characters have a long afterlife.

It's more of a kalaidoscope than a mosaic . . . It's beautiful