"Marce Catlett, Berry’s new Andy Catlett novel, brings this interplay of fiction and history to a new level. Though the novel ostensibly remains in Port William, it reads like a memoir, albeit one written in third person and cast in fictional form. As Berry lives into his tenth decade, he meditates on the way a simple story—one held in place and handed down from one generation to another—can shape our lives beyond all expectation . . . A story remembered in its place exerts a moral force. This is what Berry’s new novel shows us. But its inheritors must decide how they will respond to this force. As this novel narrates the history of this story’s life in this place, the Berry family myth takes on a public life and force, requiring its readers to decide how we will respond. May it inspire the local work that produces local benefits, but even more profoundly, may it inspire gratitude for the divine patience and forgiveness that scripts all our stories, even when they are marked by the loss of beloved goods." —Jeffrey Bilbro, Plough
"Berry knows that he will not live into a time when America’s rural places are again prosperous reconciliations of art and nature. But he has given us stories whose memories, if acted on in our places, might bloom in new and unforeseeable reconciliations." —Ethan Mannon, Front Porch Republic
"Now over 90 years old, Berry seems to have embedded in his latest novel, Marce Catlett, a kind of last word for his readers—a goodbye from Port William to us . . . [But] at the end of Marce Catlett, I realized this is not the end of Port William. All its stories still exist. There’s a reason Mr. Berry took us backward and forward in the timeline. He was teaching us how to love a people and a place, if only in our imagination, and those stories are still there." —Russell Moore, Christianity Today
"Vintage Berry, elegiac and elegant, with a profound sense of all that has been lost." —Kirkus Reviews
"Wendell Berry has never hidden behind his stories; the land and people of Port William, Ky., have always been his land and his people. This truth is perhaps never more obvious than in Marce Catlett . . . Wendell Berry returns to his beloved Port William, offering a kind of benediction full of longing for a former life threaded with wonder at its beauty and its humble persistence." —Shelf Awareness
"Berry explores the heritage of Andy Catlett, protagonist of his Port William stories and novels in this wistful tale of the steady decline of tobacco farming in America . . . In granular, Melville-esque depictions of the process by which tobacco was once cultivated, Berry crafts a paean to a distant way of life. The author’s fans will love this." —Publishers Weekly
