Always Coming Home is a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin published in 1985. This novel is about a cultural group of humans—the Kesh—who "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California." (p. i) Part novel, part textbook, part anthropologist's record, Always Coming Home explains the life and culture of the Kesh people.
The book weaves around the story of a Kesh woman called Stone Telling, who lived for years with her fathe...
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Always Coming Home is a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin published in 1985. This novel is about a cultural group of humans—the Kesh—who "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California." (p. i) Part novel, part textbook, part anthropologist's record, Always Coming Home explains the life and culture of the Kesh people.
The book weaves around the story of a Kesh woman called Stone Telling, who lived for years with her father's people—the Dayao or Condor people, whose society is rigid, patriarchal, hierarchical and militarily expansionist. The story fills less than a third of the book, with the rest being a mixture of Kesh cultural lore (including poetry, prose of various kinds, mythos, rituals, and recipes), essays on Kesh culture, and the musings of the narrator, "Pandora". Some editions of the book were accompanied by a tape of Kesh music and poetry.
Like much of Le Guin's work, Always Coming Home follows Native American and Taoist themes. It is set in a time...
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