Margaret Renkl - Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

A Read with Jenna/ TODAY ShowBook Club Selection Winner of the 2020 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist for the 2020 Southern Book Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Statesman, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Foreword Reviews, and Washington Independent Review of Books

Beautifully written, masterfully structured, and brimming with insight into the natural world, Late Migrationscan claim its place alongside Pilgrim at Tinker Creekand A Death in the Family. It has the makings of an American classic.

ANN PATCHETT, author of The Dutch House

Magnificent Conjure your favorite place in the natural world: beach, mountain, lake, forest, porch, windowsill rooftop? Precisely thereis the best place in which to savor this book.

NPR.ORG

A compact glory, crosscutting between consummate family memoir and keenly observed backyard natural history. Renkls deft juxtapositions close up the gap between humans and non-humans and revive our lost kinship with other living things.

RICHARD POWERS, author of The Overstory

Equal parts Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott with a healthy sprinkle of Tennessee dry rub thrown in.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

[Renkl] guides us through a South lush with bluebirds, pecan orchards, and glasses of whiskey shared at dusk in this collection of prose in poetry-size bits; as it celebrates bounty, it also mourns the profound losses we face every day.

O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE

[Renkl] is the most beautiful writer! I love this book. Its about the South, and growing up there, and about her love of nature and animals and her wonderful family.

REESE WITHERSPOON

Late Migrationshas echoes of Annie Dillards The Writing Lifewith grandparents, sons, dogs and birds sharing the spotlight, its a witty, warm and unaccountably soothing all-American story.

PEOPLE

One of the best books Ive read in a long time [and] one of the most beautiful essay collections that I have ever read. It will give you chills.

SILAS HOUSE, author of Southernmost

Reflective and gorgeous I have recommended this book to everybody that I know. It is a beautiful book about love, and [how] to find the beauty in the little things.

JENNA BUSH HAGER, the TODAY Show

This is the story of grief accelerated by beauty and beauty made richer by grief. Like Patti Smith in Woolgathering, Renkl aligns natural history with personal history so completely that the one becomes the other. Like Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Renkl makes, of a ring of suburbia, an alchemical exotica.

THE RUMPUS

Like the spirituality of Krista Tippetts On Beingmeets the brevity of Joe Brainard The miniature essays in Late Migrationsapproach with modesty, deliver bittersweet epiphanies, and feel like small doses of religion.

LITERARY HUB

In her poignant debut Renkl weaves together observations from her current home in Nashville and short vignettes of nature and growing up in the South.

GARDEN & GUN

Late Migrationsis a gift, and fortunate readers will steal away to a beloved nook or oasis to commune with its riches. Or they will simply dig into it, unprepared, like the mother with no gardening tools who determinedly pulls weeds until the ground blossoms. They might entrust it to fellow seekers they believe can handle its power. Consecrated, theyll leave initiated into an art of observation lived beautifully in richness, connection, worry, and love.

THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY