Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Overview

Ursula K. Le Guin’s most poetic novel unfolds in 13 interconnected stories about women and the lives of artists in a small coastal town in Oregon

One of Ursula K. Le Guin's most realistic novels, Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand, which was first published in 1991, is also among her most inventive. Cast as a series of interconnected stories set in a small vacation town on the Oregon coast, it offers vivid and powerfully evocative portraits of the town's residents and the community they have built. Some have deep roots in the village, while others have come for just a weekend: but all are pilgrims subject to inexpressible longings.

Le Guin’s response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, this unforgettable novel plumbs some of the deepest and most abiding themes in Le Guin's work, especially the relationships between mothers and daughters, the nature of women’s work, and the lives of artists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781598538311
Publisher:	Library of America
Publication date:	10/07/2025
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was the recipient of multiple Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Hometown:

Portland, Oregon

Date of Birth:

October 21, 1929

Place of Birth:

Berkeley, California

Education:

B.A., Radcliffe College; M.A., Columbia University, 1952

Website:

http://www.ursulakleguin.com

Editorial Reviews

Various private lives in an Oregon seaside village are pried open for inspection in this winning example of Le Guin's best writing—meditative, perceptive, and dead-on in its characterizations. Welcome to Klatsand, a typical American beachside community whose medley of small-town voices combine to form a timeless, penetrating novel in the classic Le Guin tradition. Tales of Klatsanders—the discouraged middle-aged couple who operate the run-down tourist court outside of town; the aging businessman whose weekend on the beach brings him face to face with his own mortality; the passionately self-reliant professor who brings her fatherless daughter home to grow up sheltered by her past; the aging librarian who indulges in a brief affair with the local bookstore owner—all start small but grow to a powerful crescendo as the town's complex entanglement of small-town loyalties, betrayals, and generations-old resentments comes clear. Le Guin performs best with her female characters—particularly the four generations of Hernes women who, from the late 1800's to the present, scandalize the town with divorce, unwed motherhood, and other forms of unheard-of independence, and whose tale of matriarchal determination occupies the final third of the book. Ending in a defiant retelling of the Persephone myth, the Hernes' story perfectly echoes and enhances the smaller tales that preceded it, making for some deeply satisfying reading—rich, warm, and as easy on the soul as an afternoon on the beach. Another triumph.

Kirkus Reviews

"Like all great writers of fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin creates imaginary worlds that restore us, hearts eased, to our own."— The Boston Globe

From the Publisher