Here and nowhere else

the long version

Here and Nowhere Else is about fierce - and yet breaking - family ties and about one woman's search for a place on a farm that was for so long all she knew. Jane Brox writes of her family's small farm in New England's Merrimack Valley. It is the place her grandfather, a Lebanese immigrant, bought in 1900 and that her father has worked all his life. The book opens on the author's return home to her aging parents and troubled brother, after years on her own and away on "an island thirty miles into the Atlantic.". In moving and hauntingly beautiful prose, Brox evokes the feel of small-farm life: the human rituals of the farmstand, the heft of a Blue Hubbard squash, the rhythms of apple-picking time.