This book tries really hard to bill itself as a novel. It’s right there on the cover: "A Novel", and the introduction tries to reframe what a novel is to make it work stating it’s oriented geographically rather than narratively. Even calling it a fix-up novel, though, would be charitable. In actuality, the book is a novella with a collection of short stories and world-building appendices edited in. It's great.
Always Coming Home is structured as a series of documents transcribed and collected by a fictional anthropologist covering a society called the Kesh. The Kesh live in Napa Valley of an immemorial future, where sea levels have risen, pockets of irradiated wastelands remain, and fossil fuels are depleted. The Kesh are a matriarchal, almost animistic society, the details of which are explored through short stories framed as the Kesh’s legends and oral histories. Other parts are more encyclopedic as appendices, charts, and maps.
The novella, Stone Telling, stands out as the best longest part of the collection. It’s the oral history of a Kesh woman who grows up in Kesh society but goes to live with her father’s society: the patriarchal, nomadic people of the Condor.
