The Splendour Falls

“.. For three decades Sam Pickering has written essays, his words rolling in a fine frenzy over ordinary life discovering the marvelous and the absurd. His curiosity ranges, but it also rumpuses and rollicks. He wanders the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, rural Connecticut, farmland in Nova Scotia, and islands in the sun. Strangers tell him their life stories—tales that are almost as odd as the fictional characters he meets. … Add smiles and laughter, a smidgen of melancholy, and a pinch or two of happy lies, and you have Pickering the essayist.”