Country People: A GMA Book Club Pick

Description

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK – NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER – A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont)–a “witty and gorgeous” (The Guardian) novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods

“Charming . . . a prescription for summer amusement that takes immediate effect . . . There’s so much fine, freewheeling observation and pillowy erudition here, it’s tempting just to sink in.”–The New York Times

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, a great capacity “to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre–perhaps ridiculous–local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Daniel Mason
Published: 07/07/2026
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 9798217197453
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 1.20″ H x 9.40″ L x 6.20″ W

About the Author
Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner, The Winter Soldier, A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth–a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize–and North Woods, a New York Times and Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2023 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, adapted for opera and the stage, and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an associate professor in the Stanford University department of psychiatry.