In the Library
My Ántonia
Willa Cather, 1918
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 6 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 6
- Length
- Length 81k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Growth of the Soil
Knut Hamsun
Hamsun's Isak clears a farm from Norwegian wilderness with his bare hands, the same patient, back-breaking love of the land that makes Ántonia's orchard a triumph.
£1.99
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby does the same thing, but trades sod houses for Long Island mansions: a narrator turning a half-known woman into the whole shape of his youth.
£1.99
About the book
For one instant before the sun drops below the prairie's rim, an ordinary plow left standing in a field is magnified black against the red disk of it, heroic, then the light goes and it is only a plow again. Willa Cather built a whole novel out of that instant: how memory blows a person, or a place, up into myth. Jim Burden tells the story of Antonia Shimerda decades after she stepped off the train from Bohemia onto grass never broken, and what he is really telling is the story of his own past, enlarged by having loved her. Her father cannot bear the exile from the country and the violin he left behind, and shoots himself in the barn that first winter. Antonia grows weathered, poor, astonishingly alive: mother to a houseful of children spilling out of a fruit cave into the light, no longer young, no longer his to keep. The people we love hardest are rarely the ones we keep. They become the whole shape of the years we were happiest.