The Floatplane Notebooks: A Novel
Language: English
Published by Workman Publishing, 1988
- Hardcover
- Used
Seller: World of Books Inc, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.World of Books Inc
AbeBooks seller since March 23, 2026
Condition: Used - Good
£ 4.80
Quantity: 2 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
The Copeland family of Listre, North Carolina, gathers every May to clean up the graveyard and talk. Every one of them has stories to tell, and it is Albert Copeland who writes it all down in the notebooks he started years ago to track the progress of the floatplanes he builds. The notebooks hold all the best-kept secrets--of love, loss, and yearnings to let go. The Floatplane Notebooks, Clyde Edgerton's third novel, first published in 1988, is a multigenerational story of the Copeland family, spanning from the antebellum era to the Vietnam War. The novel cycles through a series of six narrators, including a generations-old wisteria vine that shares elements of a dark history the family members cannot and will not reveal. Edgerton balances the comic with the realistic in a deft portrayal of the rural South and also depicts elements of the sense of loss that is a consequence of war. The Floatplane Notebooks was a selection of the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club. This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction from the author and a preface from series editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies.…
Seller Inventory # CIN0945575009G
- Title
- The Floatplane Notebooks: A Novel
- Author
- Clyde Edgerton
- Publisher
- Workman Publishing
- Publication year
- 1988
- Condition
- Good
- Binding
- Hardback
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0945575009
- ISBN 13
- 9780945575009
The Copeland family of Listre, North Carolina, goes back a long way. Meredith Copeland's father, Albert, keeps a sort of written family record in some notebooks he bought to log the flights of his home-built floatplane, a project Albert first undertook in 1956, when his children were just kids. Now that the kids are grown -- Thatcher has a son of his own, Meredith and Mark are back from Vietnam, and Noralee is off dating hippies -- the notebooks are thick with the floatplane's failures to lift off and bulging with color Polaroids of the wisteria blossoms near the family plot, favorite family dogs, Thatcher and Bliss's wedding, records of Noralee's height and weight, a diagram of the graveyard, a newspaper story about wild-child Meredith's many backfired schemes. This novel travels back in time more than one hundred years, to the Copeland bride who first planted the wisteria by the back porch that would take over the surrounding woods, and then down to the present again to show how even though times change, people are pretty much the same.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review
. . . Among the wisest, most heartfelt writing to emerge from the South in our generation. . . . Meredith Copeland's first-person account of his Vietnam experience, homecoming, and physical paralysis in North Carolina is breathtakingly stark, full, and real. Los Angeles Times"
The Floatplane Notebooks has all the marks of a master storyteller going straight for the mystery itself. All the marks, that is, of [an] American classic. Atlanta Journal-Constitution"
Clyde Edgerton is a miner of considerable skills, burrowing into the hillside of humanity to find the ore of characters so pure and so real they might just sit down beside us and tell us a tale. Washington Post Book World"
A wonderful celebration of family and tradition, with warts, humor, tragedy, and triumph. . . . An exceedingly rich book, a celebration of the human spirit that is brilliantly conceived, structured, and executed. Cincinnati Post"
"Warmly humorous, gossipy, and rich--a book with the soul of a family reunion."--New York Times Book Review
." . . Among the wisest, most heartfelt writing to emerge from the South in our generation. . . . Meredith Copeland's first-person account of his Vietnam experience, homecoming, and physical paralysis in North Carolina is breathtakingly stark, full, and real."--Los Angeles Times
"The Floatplane Notebooks has all the marks of a master storyteller going straight for the mystery itself. All the marks, that is, of [an] American classic."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Clyde Edgerton is a miner of considerable skills, burrowing into the hillside of humanity to find the ore of characters so pure and so real they might just sit down beside us and tell us a tale."--Washington Post Book World
"A wonderful celebration of family and tradition, with warts, humor, tragedy, and triumph. . . . An exceedingly rich book, a celebration of the human spirit that is brilliantly conceived, structured, and executed."--Cincinnati Post
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
World of Books Inc
Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since March 23, 2026
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