Why read The Friends of Meager Fortune?

Book cover of The Friends of Meager Fortune

Book description

In his major new novel, The Friends of Meager Fortune, Richards explores the dying days of the lumber industry in the mid-twentieth century. This is a transfixing love story of betrayal, envy, and sexual jealousy, which builds to a tragically inevitable climax. It is also a devastating portrait of a…

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Canada
Maine

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Friends of Meager Fortune as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Sydney Lea

Author

In both my novels I explore the cultural, almost exclusively oral history of Maine woodsmen and -women. An old man now, I knew people who worked as loggers, river drivers, and so on before the advent of power tools, electricity, or motorized hauling.

A non-writer friend told me about this book, which is concerned with the same culture across the New Brunswick border, mere miles from where my novels are set. His evocation of that arduous, raconteur-populated, dangerous world bolstered my own seat-of-the-pants knowledge and offered a wealth of specific physical detail and a sense of storytelling’s central importance in…

From Sydney's list on exemplifying my two crucial virtues in "realist" fiction: understatement and attention to detail.