Country People: ‘The book of the summer’ Mick Herron

‘Lyrical and joyful’ Sarah Jessica Parker

‘Told with warmth and wit, Mason’s prose shimmers in this immersive ode to stories, to the land, and its people’ Lucy Steeds, author of The Artist

‘A charming, funny, exhilarating Vermont adventure’ Clare Fuller, author of Swimming Lessons

‘Full of joy - and exactly the kind of reading experience we could all do with right now. The book of the summer’ Mick Herron, author of Slow Horses

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 far away 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, who possesses, in Kate’s, words, ‘a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere’. Soon 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, a Shakespearean temptress, and a photographer of snowflakes - until at last he stumbles upon a bizarre local legend, which, he begins to suspect, might not be a legend at all.