Angle of Repose by William Stegner

Some books you read. Others you settle into, the way you’d sink into a chair by the window on a rainy afternoon. This is one of the latter.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and written by National Book Award recipient Wallace Stegner, this is an American masterpiece—an iconic novel of the West and a deeply moving portrait of one family bound across generations.

Meet Lyman Ward. A retired history professor, recently confined to a wheelchair, dependent on others for his every need. Amid the swirling chaos of 1970s counterculture, he retreats to his ancestral home in Grass Valley, California, to write his grandmother’s biography.

And what a woman she was. An elegant, headstrong artist and pioneer who—alongside her engineer husband—carved her own path through the hardscrabble West nearly a century before. As Lyman uncovers her story, he begins to excavate his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has quietly grown up around him.

It’s a novel about marriage and memory. About the distance between who we are and who we hoped to be. Readers return to it again and again, calling it one of the finest American novels ever written—a book that lingers long after the last page.

Come find it on our shelves, just steps from the salty air of the cove. It’s the kind of story that pairs perfectly with a quiet evening and the sound of the tide rolling in.

A true discovery, waiting to be made.

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