About the Book

Inspired by his journals and writing, this moving novel inhabits the life and mind of renowned nineteenth-century naturalist, poet and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau, revealing the deep connections between his time and our own.

Composed in short, compelling scenes, Followed by the Lark is a novel of significant moments in a life, capturing loss, change and the danger and healing that come from communion with the natural world, set against a backdrop of great change and tumult in America.

Renowned nineteenth-century naturalist, poet and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau’s connection to nature was tied to his feelings of loss; before he was twenty-seven years old and went to live at Walden Pond, two of those closest to him had died—his older brother, John, and his friend Charles Wheeler. Nature provided solace for these losses, but the world was changing around him. The forests were being destroyed by the logging industry. Wildlife was increasingly being slaughtered for profit and sport. The railroad clanged through his quiet hometown. And the catastrophes of the American Civil War were beginning to stir. Haunting in its quiet spaces, Followed by the Lark portrays this tension of nature and progress and its effect on a singular man. It is a novel uncommon in its combination of scope and brevity, in its communion with its human subject, and its reflections on an astonishing yet changing world.

Thoreau’s life in the early nineteenth century seems firmly in the past, but his time bears some striking similarities to ours. As she explores these intersections in Followed by the Lark, Helen Humphreys elegantly, insistently illustrates how Thoreau’s concerns are still, vitally, our own.

Product Details

• ISBN: 9781443468923
• ISBN 10: 1443468924
• Imprint: HarperCollins Publishers
• On Sale: 02/13/2024
• Pages: 240
• List Price:32.99 CAD
• BISAC1 : FICTION / Biographical
• BISAC2 : FICTION / Historical
• BISAC3 : FICTION / Nature & the Environment

Helen Humphreys

Biography

HELEN HUMPHREYS is an acclaimed and award-winning author of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, a Lambda Literary Award for Fiction and the Toronto Book Award. She has also been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Award and CBC’s Canada Reads. Her most recent work includes the novel Rabbit Foot Bill and the memoir And a Dog Called Fig. The recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence, Helen Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario. 

Other Works by Helen Humphreys

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  Followed by the Lark

  By Helen Humphreys

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  And a Dog Called Fig

  By Helen Humphreys

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  Rabbit Foot Bill

  By Helen Humphreys