Country People: A GMA Book Club Pick

A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind--a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America's greatest living writers

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 faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the 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 those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world's delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: 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.

Author: Daniel Mason
Publisher: Random House
Published: 07/07/2026
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 9.51h x 6.11w x 1.31d
ISBN: 9798217197453


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 05/01/2026 pg. 114
Kirkus Reviews 06/01/2026
Booklist 06/01/2026

About the Author
Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner, The Winter Soldier, A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth--a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--and North Woods, a New York Times and Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2023 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, adapted for opera and the stage, and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an associate professor in the Stanford University department of psychiatry.