Praise for GOSHEN ROAD
by Bonnie Proudfoot
“Goshen Road is rich with life and characters who command our attention. These beautiful intertwined stories introduce a wise and wonderful voice.”
—Gail Galloway Adams, author of The Purchase of Order
“Goshen Road is a rich, multigenerational tale exploring women’s expanding roles in a rural environment. The women are afforded few opportunities here, and they often settle for much less than they deserve, but they are resourceful and ultimately as resilient and reliable as the untamable land.”
—Marie Manilla, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly
“Bonnie Proudfoot writes the kind of book that means something, a book that carries weight in a way that only serious fiction can. Her words delight and move, but they do much more than that. She interrogates the truth of the people and place of Appalachia. Her debut should be savored by those who admire timeless fiction.”
—Charles Dodd White, author of In The House of Wilderness
“It takes no more than the opening sentence of Goshen Road to bring vividly to life the ruggedly forested mountains of West Virginia and the resolute people who make their lives among them. Told alternately through the voices of a family, Proudfoot does not merely allow readers to witness her characters’ lives, but brings us among them as visitors. Her characters are not the ‘other,’ an archetype that is the bane of Appalachian Literature; they are not the meth addicts or oxycontin dealers that pollute so much of what is written about our region today. The community of Goshen Road is economically depressed, but it is not damned by impoverishment; its citizens do not suffer from ‘learned helplessness.’ They care for family and community and in their lives evoke the heroics of everyday struggle.”
—Chris Holbrook, author of Upheaval: Stories
“Goshen Road is like a detailed and lovely landscape painting, with much to draw—and keep—us in. With a fine attunement to the ironies of human behavior, Proudfoot treats her characters with dignity, honors their complexity, and renders them with poetry.”
—Mark Brazaitis, author of The Incurables
“Bonnie Proudfoot’s novel-in-stories unerringly drills down to the bedrock of human relationships. How do we love? How do we make a living? Proudfoot never bewails her characters’ choices, but rather acknowledges their failures while admiring their dreams and creative, intelligent loyalty to each other and their West Virginia home.”
—Meredith Sue Willis, author of Their Houses and Out of the Mountains
GOSHEN ROAD
GOSHEN ROAD
A NOVEL
Bonnie Proudfoot
SWALLOW PRESS
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS, OHIO
Swallow Press
An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2020 by Bonnie Proudfoot
All rights reserved
To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Swallow Press / Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).
Printed in the United States of America
Swallow Press / Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Proudfoot, Bonnie, 1954- author.
Title: Goshen Road : a novel / Bonnie Proudfoot.
Description: Athens, Ohio : Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019041147 | ISBN 9780804012225 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780804012232 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780804041072 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Working class families--West Virginia--Fiction. | Appalachian Region--Fiction
Classification: LCC PS3616.R68 G67 2020 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041147
To my mother, my aunt, my grandmothers, my children
And thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen and thou shall be near unto me, thou and thy children’s children, and thy flocks and thy herds and all that thou hast.
—Gen. 45:10
CONTENTS
