The Valley of the Moon

Half a century before Kerouac's restless wanderers hit the road, Jack London gave America a different kind of journey: not away from something, but toward a dream. Saxon Brown toils in an Oakland laundry, her body wrung dry by twelve-hour shifts while industrial smoke chokes the California sky. Then Billy Roberts walks into her life, and together they make a radical choice: leave the strikes and the tenements behind, buy a piece of land, and build something with their own hands. What follows is a migration through the heart of the state, from the grape valleys of Sonoma to the wild places in between, as two people discover what they're made of when the factory whistle no longer controls their days. London, never one to shy from the body's animal hunger, writes Saxon's desire and Billy's tenderness with startling frankness for 1913. This is a novel about the price of freedom, both its sweetness and its cost.