The Maytrees Audiobook By Annie Dillard cover art

The Maytrees

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The Maytrees

By: Annie Dillard
Narrated by: David Rasche
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About this listen

Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. At first he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems.

In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. Lou takes up painting, and when their son, Pete, arrives, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. These people are all loving and ironic. Theirs is a simple and bold story.

In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts nature's vastness and nearness while presenting willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love.

©2007 Annie Dillard (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers
Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Witty

Critic reviews

"Dillard calls on her erudition as a naturalist and her grace as a poet to create an enthralling story of marriage - particular and universal, larky and monumental." ( Publishers Weekly)
"As she casts a spell sensuous and metaphysical, Dillard covertly bids us to emulate may trees - the resilient hawthorn - the tree of joy, of spring, of the heart." ( Booklist)

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Lovely

Lovely, melodic, beautiful story of life, love, and peaceful existence as the world continues on its way.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Too formal for an intimate connection

This book is beautifully crafted, but I always felt 'at arms length' from the Maytrees. Annie Dillard writes like a poet, but it's hard to 'feel' her characters from the inside out.' As I read this book, it felt as though I was hearing the story as a conversation between two other people. I like to be immersed in a character's feelings and to feel I'm present with them in that moment. If you feel the same, read 'On beauty', by Zadie Smith.