Bird Cloud

Proulx, Annie

3.16

1,702 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 0743597249 ISBN 13: 9780743597241

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2011

Part family history, part naturalist’s journal—and her first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years— Bird Cloud is Annie Proulx’s vivid chronicle of building a house on a spectacularly beautiful piece of land in Wyoming.

Idiosyncratic, original, and spectacularly vivid, Bird Cloud was conceived as a book about building a house and then became a family history, an archaeology of the Wyoming landscape, and as close to memoir as Annie Proulx will ever get. A half dozen years ago, Proulx fell in love with 600 acres being sold by The Nature Conservancy of Wyoming. Grazing land plunged down a 400-foot cliff to the North Platte River. The property was home to bald eagles, mountain lions, and cranes.

Interspersed with tales of construction and the stunning wildlife at Bird Cloud is family history going back to a great-great grandfather who was a river boat captain in the west in the mid-nineteenth century—a kindred spirit, it seems, who met Lafayette, Audubon, and Mark Twain.

Bird Cloud will be an opportunity for reviewers and listeners to see what Annie Proulx is made of, where she comes from, how her magnificent mind works, and why she writes so brilliantly.

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Review:

‘Proulx’s prose is monumental’ Observer

'Magic ... Books are like homes and within 10 pages of crossing the threshold of this one readers will put up their feet, secure in the knowledge that they won’t be moving on to another any time soon ' Geoff Dyer, Observer

‘A love letter to place...which interweaves details of the land’s daily upkeep with her own equally evocative history’ Vogue

A masterpiece’ A. N. Wilson

About the Author:

Annie Proulx's books include the novel ‘The Shipping News’ and the story collection ‘Fine Just the Way It Is’. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story ‘Brokeback Mountain’, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. She lives in Wyoming.

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