PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A “masterful” ( Boston Globe ) portrait of four generations in an American family and the traditions of our national past “Brilliant . . . Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enhancement of life.”— Los Angeles Times Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need. Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who, together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has come of age around him.