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Published Jun 2022
240 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
This captivating memoir is a "startling testimony to the glories and sorrows of raising and harvesting plants and animals" (Anthony Doerr, bestselling author of All the Light We Cannot See), as an itinerant farmhand chronicles the wonders hidden within the ever-blooming seasons of life, death, and rebirth.
Pig Years catapults American nature writing into the 21st century, and has been hailed by Lydia Davis and Aimee Nezhukumatathil as "engrossing" and "a marvel." As a farmer in Upstate New York and Vermont, Ellyn Gaydos lives on the knife edge between loss and gain. Her debut memoir draws us into this precarious world, conjuring with stark simplicity the lifeblood of the farm: its livestock and stark full moons, the sharp cold days lives near to the land. Joy and tragedy are frequent bedfellows. Fields go barren and animals meet their end too soon, but then their bodies become food in a time-old human ritual. Seasonal hands are ground down by the hard work, but new relationships are formed, love blossoms and Gaydos yearns to become a mother. As winter's dark descends, Pig Years draws us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are star-bright symbols of hope and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, even in the slaughter.
In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor, and loss within a landscape given to flux.
"This diamond in the rough is sure to be a bestseller. It would support and complement any library collection for its history, husbandry, and honesty." - Library Journal (starred review)
"Gaydos brings her experience farming, in particular breeding animals for slaughter, to a debut that's in turns lyrical and brutal. Gaydos grew up wanting to work on a farm and quickly found after landing her first job in the field at age 18 that the life suited her...This one will stick with readers long after the last page is turned." - Publishers Weekly
"Lyrical and cleareyed insight into farming from a writer devoted to both crafts...Gaydos describes the realities of farm life with honest precision, neither indulging in unnecessary dramatizing nor shying away from the numerous harsh realities...A complex and fraught portrait of a lifestyle that is simultaneously protective, precarious, and resistant to change." - Kirkus Reviews
"The rhythms of Ellyn Gaydos's new memoir, Pig Years, are the rhythms of nature, of life itself and, yes, death, too. No wonder the book, with its slow burn of uncomfortable facts and sober truth, burrows under the reader's skin." - Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Chances Are
"Ellyn Gaydos's accounts of her pigs and the farms they live on are told with studied compassion and exquisitely observed detail. She brings us intimately into the vital, unrelenting work of a small produce farm; we feel, with her, the biting cold and the weight of the mud, as well as the peaceful intervals of rest and human companionship. With crystalline expression, Gaydos relates her experience of a dedicated farmer's life, and her very personal testimony is an engrossing pleasure." - Lydia Davis, author of Essays: One and Essays: Two
"Pig Years is a pulsing, keen, and startling testimony to the glories and sorrows of raising and harvesting plants and animals. Its paragraphs conjure the fecundity of life, the brutality of loss, and the grace of a life lived in the grooves of the seasons." - Anthony Doerr, author of Cloud Cuckoo Land and All the Light We Cannot See
This information about Pig Years was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ellyn Gaydos received an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Columbia University. Her work has received the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social justice journalism, and appeared in The Texas Review, Columbia Journal, and Ninth Letter, where she received the 2017 award for creative nonfiction. She lives in New Lebanon, New York.
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