The Road to Walden North: A Novel

In The Road to Walden North, New England author Sheila Post offers timely insights for a new age still grappling with issues raised by Thoreau over 150 years ago. An elegiac Walden revisited, this resplendent novel invites readers to accompany the transcendental journey of Harvard Professor Dr. Kate Brown-from talking the talk of theory to walking the walk of experience along the less traveled road of Thoreauvian simplicity. While deftly engaging with the motifs of Thoreau’s classic, chapter by chapter, The Road to Walden North also transcends its literary context, through its richly nuanced chronicle of the life-altering interactions among four individuals whose worlds converge and collide on the campus of Harvard University. The narrative depicts both the desperate and deliberate lives of its main characters as they consider roads taken and not: Heather Channing, a back-to-the-lander student adrift in the elite world of Harvard; William Channing, her organic grower, Buddhist, Ph.D. father, a cultural exile in the north woods of Vermont; Blake Prentiss, a Boston Brahmin with multi-generational family ties to Harvard, and Kate Brown, a newly hired Assistant Professor, whose life revolves around her academic work, until forced to grapple with the implications of the themes she teaches in her freshmen seminar on Walden. A luminous tapestry of dreams lost and found, The Road to Walden North will continue to rewild the lives and souls of its readers long after arriving in Walden North.