But Still They Sing

by Riordan, J.F.

• ISBN13: 9780825310331
• ISBN10: 0825310334
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-07-11
• Publisher: Beaufort Books

Summary

From the award-winning author of the North of the Tension Line series comes a timely, heartfelt collection of essays.

In the lyrical prose style familiar to her readers, author J.F. Riordan records a natural world minutely observed. From an examination of life's fragility via a bathtub spider, to a tree-borne cluster of raccoons huddled together in a polar vortex, the essays capture the peculiar isolation, focus, and intensity of the pandemic lockdown, while marking the contrast of nature’s ruthlessness with human suffering. 

"Our life’s landscape isn’t geographical. It’s human. When you are young, life is an endless horizon of years ahead. It’s hard to realize how fast time goes, and how quickly the people we assume will always be here can suddenly be gone, changing the world forever. It’s easy to allow the demands of every day to take up our energy and our hours. But in this, in every day, we have the essence of our lives. Our lives are only time, and, however far off the horizon seems, finite."

Deeply insightful and personal, by turns soulful and humorous, But Still They Sing belongs at the bedside of anyone in search of the comfort and companionship of a humane voice.

Author Biography

Award-winning author J.F. Riordan has been called “a latter-day Jane Austen”. Her mesmerizing literary fiction makes the Great Lakes region one of the characters in a continuing series. The North of the Tension Line books (North of the Tension Line; The Audacity of Goats; Robert’s Rules; A Small Earnest Question; and soon, Throwing Bears for George) represent a sensibility that is distinctively Midwestern, even though the small town politics and gossip will be universally familiar. Riordan celebrates the well-lived life of the ordinary man and woman with meticulously drawn characters and intriguing plots that magnify the beauty and mystery lingering near the surface of everyday life.

Equally adept as an essayist, her writings are by turns insightful and personal; soulful and humorous, and belong at the bedside of anyone in search of the comfort and companionship of a humane voice She lives in Wisconsin with her husband and two German Shepherds.