Always Coming Home

Synopsis

The Kesh people in the Valley and the Condor people in The City regularly meet. They influence each other, and some Kesh try to emulate the Condor. Sometimes there's conflict. Stone Telling records her own experience with this, daughter of a Kesh woman and a Condor man, growing up with her mother, living with her father in The City for a while. -- This is only one story among many in this book.

Notes

• This work is structured more as an anthropological study than a novel, and contains quite a number of separately titled poems, songs and stories. Some of them (The Trouble with the Cotton People, The Visionary, Dira, Time in the Valley, It Was Never Really Different, A Song Used in Chumo When Damming a Creek or Diverting Water to a Holding Tank for Irrigation, A Bay Laurel Song, An Exhortation from the Second and Third Houses of the Earth) have been published by themselves.
• Of the first edition, Ursula writes (in Locus #301): The boxed hardcover with cassette, called the "deluxe edition" by the publisher came out simultaneously with the trade paperback. "The boxed hardcover sold out very promptly, but new boxes were produced for it. ... As for the unboxed hardcover without cassette, this is the "library edition" ... for librarians who thought they did not want to handle the cassette. If this means that there are actually three first edition, I can only say *sigh* -- forget it. The cassette is part of the book, anyhow."