Great Divide - Paperback

by Emily Kiernan (Author)

Great Divide is a novel about memory, the power of the past to shape and subsume the present, and the pressing, terrible need to escape the drowning force of history. The reader inhabits the conflicted and mercurial interior of Jane, a young woman fleeing from years of abuse in her Oregon seacoast home to an uncertain freedom with her boyfriend in the landlocked new world of the Kansas plains. As Jane travels, her progress is threatened by nostalgia and attachment, responsibility and ambivalence, and, finally, by a massive flood which threatens to overwhelm both her past and her future. Great Divide is a novel precariously afloat atop a sea of time, at once alluring and threatening, beckoning us to dive in.

Author Biography

A native of a decaying Pennsylvania steel town (the one from the Billy Joel song), Emily Kiernan writes about islands, vaudeville, implacable but unjustified feelings of abandonment, the West, and places that aren't the way she remembered them. Emily is a graduate of the MFA writing program at the California Institute of the Arts and resides in Berkeley, CA.