PRE-ORDER: The Green Age of Asher Witherow (20th Anniversary Edition)
Coming December 2024.
Pre-orders now accepted! Your copy will ship to you in December.
M. Allen Cunningham's debut novel in a special 20th-anniversary edition.
Paperback: 350 pages
$20.00
The Green Age of Asher Witherow is a rich, gothic tale of a young soul coming of age during the explosive boom and bust years of an immigrant coal mining town in nineteenth-century California. In this powerful debut, M. Allen Cunningham takes us into a time and place at once gritty and magical, when the future seems filled with promise but where the day’s labor is bone breaking, numbing and always dangerous.
"In this mesmerizing first novel by a gifted young writer, the drama of California’s rich immigrant history and the freshness and wonder of childhood combine with darker elements of legend, magic and mystery ... In breathtaking language that contrasts the striking landscape of California's Diablo Valley with the harsh details of life in an 1870s coal-mining boom town, M. Allen Cunningham takes us to an extraordinary time and place. It is a time when the brutal hardships of daily life are leavened by a sense of miraculous change just around the corner. It is a place of sensual, almost supernatural beauty, peopled with remarkable characters. ... Impeccably imagined, sensitive and real in its portrayal of a young boy confronting unanswerable questions with grace and strength, The Green Age of Asher Witherow ... convincingly shatters the equation of childhood and innocence."--BookBrowse, Your Guide to Exceptional Books
"First novelist Cunningham writes no semiautobiographical coming-of-age story, but a thoroughly researched and accomplished historical novel. Its unusual structure and richly descriptive, evocative language display a mastery that is surprising in a novelistic debut." --Booklist
"With heartfelt characters and stunning descriptions, Cunningham presents a historical glimpse of squalor in the mines that will haunt readers. Highly recommended." --Library Journal (starred review)
"The Green Age of Asher Witherow deserves your immediate consideration. An accomplished first novel from a talented new writer...a mix of wild supposition and real-life facts...part legend, part horror story, part Pacific Rim myth, part fact and part metaphor...Cunningham has struck a rich vein of story with this book, and everything points to him being able to write something just as good, or better, next time around."--Santa Cruz Sentinel
"One of the finest debut novels I've ever read. ... For a twenty-six-year-old novelist to produce this book ought to be impossible, but you hold the shocking evidence in your hands." --Steve Yarbrough
"A beautifully conceived, adroitly executed novel that defies simple categorization … It is wonderful. Don’t miss it." --NewPages
"It is impossible to read this book without experiencing profound emotional and spiritual modulation." --Square Books (Oxford, MS)
"Nowhere is the theme of personal redemption and the hard-won understandings that precede it more powerfully drawn than in M. Allen Cunningham’s riveting debut novel, The Green Age of Asher Witherow…a brilliant story from one of America’s most promising voices."— ForeWord Reviews