Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father who tells brilliantly outlandish bedtime stories.
He's the owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a place with no truffles.
He is also twelve years late finishing his PhD on Russian folklore, and quietly aware he has become a disappointment to the people who love him.
When his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship in rural Vermont, the family leave California behind for a new life in the woods. What follows is a year of roadside farm stands, eccentric neighbours, and a local radio call-in show that keeps interrupting itself with stranger and stranger stories.
Miles is eventually drawn into a secretive local society convinced that a nineteenth-century pastor once discovered an entrance to a hidden underground kingdom somewhere nearby, and the search for it becomes tangled up with his own search for a way forward.
Mason is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the bestselling author of North Woods, and Country People has the same gift for finding the uncanny inside ordinary life.
It's funny, generous, and a little magical, and it's already a Good Morning America Book Club pick.
Add Country People to your Want to Read shelf and let us know what you make of Mason's Vermont.
Publisher: Random House (Penguin Random House) | Genre: Literary Fiction | Published: 7 July 2026 | Pages: 320