Castlebar Book Club
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton arrive from Boston in the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire. Serena is new to the mountains - but she soon shows herself the equal of any worker, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness. Yet she also learns that she will never bear a child. Serena's discovery will set in motion a course of events that will change the lives of everyone in this remote community. As the Pembertons' intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel, this riveting story of love, passion and revenge moves toward its shocking reckoning. Award-winning and New York Times bestselling novelist Ron Rash conjures a gothic tale of greed, corruption, and revenge with a ruthless, powerful, and unforgettable woman at its heart, set amid the wilds of 1930s North Carolina and against the backdrop of America's burgeoning environmental movement.
Amazon
About the author
Award-winning novelist and poet Ron Rash is the author of eight previous books. Serena is his first to be published in the UK. He lives in the Appalachian mountains, USA and teaches at Western Carolina University.
Bitter and brilliant ... it could sit comfortably on any bookshelf beside Cormac McCarthy or Charles Frazier ... the plot moves with precision, beautifully wrought. The author's acute sense of place is evident on every page.
The Guardian
There’s something unabashedly hokey about Ron Rash’s Serena, a novel of love, hate and clear-cutting set in Depression-era North Carolina -- and I mean that in the best possible way. It resembles one of those high-end mid-20th-century bestsellers with a title lifted from Ecclesiastes and a movie version in Technicolor, directed by Douglas Sirk, with a tag line like, "They were as bold as the country that made them!" The good guys in this melodrama are good, the bad guys are really bad and the meaning of it all is crystal clear. There’s even a chorus of crusty old lumberjacks hanging around to comment on the action in case any readers fail to get the point. In an age when literary fiction is so intent on subtlety that it often winds up virtually inert, a novel with this much uncomplicated gusto and narrative drive is a rare thing; in the case of Serena, it's also a welcome one.
Salon
Set in 1929, in the rugged mountains of North Carolina, Rash's novel is a tightly knit tale of industrial development, greed, and betrayal. George Pemberton and his new bride, Serena, maintain a close watch over a burgeoning logging empire, dealing with their workers while fighting off the efforts of environmental activists to expand the country's network of national parks. As the title character, a Depression-era Lady Macbeth wholly comfortable in the wilderness drives her husband to commit increasingly malevolent acts, he must also contend with the reemergence of a woman with whom he had an illegitimate child years earlier. Rash's evocative rendering of the blighted landscape and the tough characters who inhabit it recalls both John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy, while the malignant character of Serena, who projects a stark unflinching certainty about her actions, propels his finely paced story.
The New Yorker
In this beautifully written gothic novel, Rash paints an unforgettable portrait of a truly frightening woman, an "Ayn Rand [character] taken to sociopathic extremes" (Christian Science Monitor). Drawing comparisons to Lady Macbeth and Medea, critics were repulsed and fascinated by Serena. Though some felt that her wickedness, undiluted by the slightest pangs of compassion or empathy, crossed into the realm of caricature toward the end, they all agreed that it was impossible to put the book down. Serena is not overtly political, despite a depraved doctor named Cheney, but it does provide a stinging indictment of the devastation wrought by greed, unfettered capitalism, and the misuse of power. Readers will be haunted by this extraordinary novel long after the final page is turned.
Bookmarks Magazine
Rash’s short stories and previous novels are all set in Appalachia and enriched by the region’s unique history. This is his most gripping work yet, a sweeping saga of unfathomable greed and revenge that grabs the reader’s attention from the first page. The Depression-era tale is centered on newly married George and Serena Pemberton, owners of a logging company in the mountains of North Carolina. Their operation is aimed strictly at maximizing profits, with no regard for either the safety of their workers or the future of the land they’re pillaging. The tragic result of environmental disregard looms large in all of Rash’s fiction, and the Pembertons are his worst villains to date in that respect—leaving behind a “wasteland of stumps and slash and creeks awash with dead trout.” Side plots involve the drastic means, including murder, the couple employs to avoid losing land to environmental groups and Serena’s unflagging pursuit of the young girl who bore George’s son shortly after he and Serena were married. With a setting fraught with danger, and a character maniacal in her march toward domination and riches, Serena is a novel not soon forgotten.
Booklist (starred review)
Serena, the Lady Macbeth of Ron Rash's stirring new novel, wouldn't fret about getting out the damned spot. She wouldn't even wash her hands; she'd just lick it off. I couldn't take my eyes off this villainess, and any character who does ends up dead. Alluring and repellant, she's the engine in a gothic tale of personal mayhem and environmental destruction set in the mountains of North Carolina during the Depression. We meet her as the new bride of a timber baron arriving to survey 34,000 acres of virgin land that she and her husband, Pemberton, hope to strip as quickly as possible. The other investors don't bring their wives into the mountains like this, but Serena is no ordinary wife. At the start of the novel, the newlyweds are intercepted at the train station by the father of a pregnant 16-year-old girl. Pemberton can't even remember her name, but he doesn't doubt she's carrying his baby; Serena is unfazed. "You're a lucky man," she tells the girl's father, who's seething with drunken rage. "You'll not find a better sire to breed her with." Then she turns to the girl: "But that's the only one you'll have of his. I'm here now." Yikes, is she ever. Wearing her leather jodhpurs and black boots, she strides through the story that follows with frightening self-confidence ... The final chapter is as flawless and captivating as anything I've read this year, a perfectly creepy shock that will leave you hearing nothing but the wind between the stumps.
The Washington Post
Readers' Resources
Dedicated to book clubs, ReadersPlace.co.uk (Random House) is a website where reading groups can find inspiration, have their say on books, and connect with other book clubs and authors. Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- CompletelyNovel.com links readers as well as new writers, offering a one-stop author-reader experience.
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities