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Sign up todayThe Quickening
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Learn moreEnidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, who has never wanted more than the land she works and the animals she raises on it with her husband, Frank. But for the deeply religious Mary, farming is an awkward living and at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary creates a clean and orderly home life for her stormy husband, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation of a rural town through the inspiration of a local preacher. She is the first to befriend Eddie in a relationship that will prove as rugged as the ground they walk on. Despite having little in common, Eddie and Mary need one another for survival and companionship. But as the Great Depression threatens, the delicate balance of their reliance on one another tips, pitting neighbor against neighbor, exposing the dark secrets they hide from one another, and triggering a series of disquieting events that threatens to unravel not only their friendship but their families as well.
In this luminous and unforgettable debut, Michelle Hoover explores the polarization of the human soul in times of hardship and the instinctual drive for self-preservation by whatever means necessary. The Quickening stands as a novel of lyrical precision and historical consequence, reflecting the resilience and sacrifices required even now in our modern troubled times.
Michelle Hoover has published fiction in Confrontation, the Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Best New American Voices, and others. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference scholar, the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the 2005 winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. She was born in Ames, Iowa, the granddaughter of four longtime farming families.
Carrington MacDuffie is a recording artist and spoken-word performer whose voice acting has been featured in several independent films. Following a lengthy run with a New York vaudeville revue, she spent many years singing, writing, and producing multimedia performances with her seven-piece pop band. Her one-woman spoken-word show, On the Dreaming Earth, has been staged at various venues in Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest. MacDuffie has received several of AudioFile’s Earphones awards, and KLIATT says, “MacDuffie’s reading is amazing.”
Bernadette Dunne, winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards, studied at the Royal National Theatre in London and the Studio Theater in Washington, DC. She lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews
“I grew up among Iowa farm women, and Michelle Hoover has perfectly captured their voices and stories with great wisdom, tenderness, and beauty.”
“Hoover’s powerful debut tells the story of the intertwined fortunes of two early twentieth-century Midwestern farm women…In this finely wrought and starkly atmospheric narrative, Hoover’s characters carry deep secrets, and their emotions are as intense as the acts of nature that shape their world.”
“A haunting, beautifully told story…Hoover writes with such emotional clarity about these two women, their fierce maternal instincts and their determination to survive in spite of impossible hardships, that the reader can almost feel their presence. Hoover is the granddaughter of four-generation-old farming families, so perhaps this empathy is in her genes, resulting in a captivating and heartfelt first novel.”
“A vivid, pastoral panorama…imbued throughout with a careful and evenly wrought lyricism.”
“From the opening pages of this beautiful novel, I found myself immersed in the lives of these two farm women between the wars and their struggles with their families, themselves, the land, and each other. The Quickening is such a fully realized, sensually vivid, psychologically intelligent novel that it’s hard to believe it is a debut, but it is and a sparkling one.”
“Michelle Hoover’s writing is brilliant and gutsy. She sees deeply, with great wisdom and compassion, and she creates characters who are complex and authentic.”
“The Quickening, through its carefully wrought, precise prose, builds with a heartrending power that lingers long after the final page. Michelle Hoover is a writer to watch.”
“Michelle Hoover’s fine debut novel recreates for us a way of life and a set of personalities that have vanished from our current scene, and she does so with a solidity of detail that will impress these people and these places forever on your memory.”
“Though The Quickening is her first novel, Michelle Hoover does what all the best writers steeped in a particular place do—use that place as a conduit to the universal and timeless mysteries of the heart. What an exceptional debut this book is.”
“The Quickening is a rare jewel of a novel: an elegantly structured page-turner driven as much by its exquisite lyricism as it is by the gripping story at its core. It wondrously weaves a riveting half-century of American Midwestern history through the sensual, intimate, often strange details that make up a life. Michelle Hoover is a stunning writer and this is a fierce and beautiful book.”
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