Our Daily Bread [Paperback]

Lauren B. Davis (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 1, 2011

"Backwoods Noir" at its best. For generations the Erskine clan has lived in poverty and isolation on North Mountain, shunned by the God-fearing people of nearby Gideon. Now, Albert Erskine comes down off the mountain hoping to change the future for his brothers and sisters and sets in motion a chain of events that will change everything. Inspired by a true story. From best-selling novelist Lauren B. Davis comes the deeply compassionate story of what happens when we view our neighbors as "The Other," as well as the transcendent power of unlikely friendships.

OUR DAILY BREAD is a compelling narrative set in a closely observed, sometimes dark, but ultimately life-enhancing landscape. Lauren B Davis' vivid prose and empatheticaly developed characters will remain in the reader's mind long after the final chapter has been read." -- Jane Urquhart, prize winning author of AWAY and THE STONE CARVERS.

"I'll never forget this book, the sunning power of the descriptions, the attention to detail, the riveting plot, the fully-realized characters--this is storytelling at its very best." -- Duff Brenna, author of THE BOOK OF MAMIE, THE HOLY BOOK OF THE BEARD, TOO COOL

"From the first chapter of OUR DAILY BREAD...I was hooked--by the characters, by the flow, by the clean, rhythmic prose." -- Thomas E. Kennedy, author of THE COPENHAGEN QUARTET

"Rendered with gorgeous prose, this compact, fast-moving novel features an astonishing range of tones, from hope to heartbreak, from black humor to white-knuckle terror." -- Dexter Palmer, author of THE DREAM OF PERPETUAL MOTION

Editorial Reviews

Review

" Powerful, harrowing, and deeply unsettling.  It keeps you reading as your blood pressure mounts...proceeds like a noose gradually tightening...stark, beautiful, sad and frankly terrifying...finely crafted, with careful attention to characterization, style, and pacing.  It succeeds on every level."
--(Starred Review) The Quill & Quire

"Absorbing, strikingly-written, and subtly-honed . . . a page-turner!" --  Gordon Hauptfleisch, blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-our-daily-bread-a/

"full of remarkable moments. . . a level of detail that puts us in the beating hearts of imperiled souls. . . . simple, brave, powerful scenes, skillfully written with an anger no less effective for being tempered - scenes that sit with the soul long after the book is closed." -  Alan Cuymn, THE GLOBE & MAIL

Longlisted for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Named as one of the "Very Best Books of 2011" by THE GLOBE & MAIL and the BOSTON GLOBE.

"Thrilling . . unflinching . . unforgettable. Davis makes us care about her characters . . imaginatively transformed by exquisite prose.  Her moral fiction calls us to empathize, read, imagine and hear. This is a story of getting lost in the woods, of meeting the monster and getting out alive." Jean Randich, Truthdig.com

From the Author

One of the things I've been troubled by in the past few years is the increasing polarization I see around me.  It pops up in any number of places - religion, politics both local and international, public rhetoric, the media, etc.  We don't have to look far for examples - perhaps no farther than our prisons, or the town next door, or even in our own families.
I write to figure out what I think about things and to attempt to find meaning.  I try to find metaphors in which to explore my feelings and thoughts on what obsesses me.

As I pondered my concerns about the ever-widening gaps I noticed around me, a story from my past kept rising to the surface.  I lived in Nova Scotia for a brief time in 1972-1973.  While there, I heard stories about a community up on a nearby mountain.  They were terrible stories, involving incest, aborted and deformed babies, prostitution, bootlegging and so forth.  I told myself these dreadful tales couldn't be true. I believed, naively, that if they were true, surely someone would have done something about it. Then, in the early 1980s one of the children of the Goler clan told her story of generational abuse to a teacher.  This teacher came from another province and hadn't been in Nova Scotia very long.  She in turn called an RCMP officer, who also hadn't been in the community for very long. They insisted an investigation begin and eventually many of the clan adults were in jail and the children in foster care.


I was horrified, but also mystified.  If all those rumors were true, why had it taken so long for someone to intervene? Well, the answer seemed to be that the people who lived on the mountain had, for generations, been considered "Those People" as in "What do you expect from those people?"  The people who lived in the prosperous Annapolis Valley nearby, in communities founded hundreds of years earlier on Puritanical religious principles, believed their neighbors were so "Other" as to be beyond the pale.


The extreme marginalization of the community and the terrible repercussions of ostracism haunted me and it seemed the perfect framework to explore how such ordinary people could do such dreadful things, or permit such dreadful things to continue.


I have had several instances in my own life of feeling like the "Other."  Although I explore the theme more personally in my previous novel, THE STUBBORN SEASON, in which a young girl battles the tyranny of living with a mentally ill mother during the Great Depression, in OUR DAILY BREAD the character of Ivy Evans is based on some of my own experiences with marginalization.  My family, afflicted by mental illness and alcoholism, was going through a rough time the summer I was nine.  I was an only child, and adopted, and rather bookish and prone to making up stories, all of which helped to make me 'Other' in the eyes of some of the children in the neighborhood.  That summer, a lady who owned a little antique shop near my house let me hang around the store.  I'm sure she never knew just how much that meant to me, but it was a refuge from loneliness and bullying and I've never forgotten it.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 260 pages
• Publisher: Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC (October 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1877655724
• ISBN-13: 978-1877655722
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #185,445 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

see: www.laurenbdavis.com and www.laurenbdavis.com/blog/

Lauren's new novel, THE EMPTY ROOM will be published by Harper Collins Canada in May, 2013.

OUR DAILY BREAD (Wordcraft of Oregon), was longlisted for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize, named as one of the "Very Best Books of 2011" by The Globe & Mail and The Boston Globe, and earned a starred review in the industry publication "Quill & Quire". Her first novel, THE STUBBORN SEASON, was a national bestseller and named as one of the Top 15 Bestselling First Novels by Amazon.ca and Books in Canada. It was also chosen by Robert Adams for his prestigious 2003-2004 book review series. Her second novel, THE RADIANT CITY, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Award. She has also published two collections of short stories, AN UNREHEARSED DESIRE (longlisted for the Relit Award) and RAT MEDICINE & OTHER UNLIKELY CURATIVES.

Lauren B. Davis was born in Montreal and lived in France for ten years from 1994-2004. She now lives in Princeton, New Jersey with her husband, Ron, and her dog, Bailey, known as the Rescuepoo.

A well-respected creative writing teacher who has taught in Geneva, Paris and Ireland, as well as in the USA and Canada, she is also a past Mentor with the Humber College Creative Writing Program, and past Writer-in-Residence at Trinity Church, Princeton. She now leads "Sharpening the Quill" writers' workshops in Princeton.

For more information, please visit her website at: http://www.laurenbdavis.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Luscious prose February 11, 2012

By Mark Wheeler

Format:Paperback

Just finished this meticulously constructed novel and am still reveling in the sound of its prose. Lauren constructs her sentences so beautifully and builds detail upon detail into scenes that pop up in your head like film. My copy of Our Daily Bread is full of dog eared pages I am planning to go and reread for their sheer beauty.

Despite the rough underbelly of the subject matter Lauren finds moments of radiance in each character and their tragic lives. She is a classic storyteller, and this book leaves the reader satisfied knowing they have been guided along by the sure hand of someone who has mastered her craft.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Shouldn't have waited to read this book October 24, 2012

By David Henry

Format:Paperback

Sometimes I am very foolish. Like in taking so long to read a Lauren Davis novel.

I loved it, absolutely loved it, although there were a few gritty parts that, although necessary for the power of this wonderful story, left me disturbed and putting the book down for the night a little earlier than I had expected.

For me it was a fast read. By page 50 I was fully engaged by the clean, smooth writing that opened my heart to the very real, very human characters in their very real lives, and their very real efforts, sometimes heroic, to make a life.

By page 60 I had started underlining and making comments in the margins, expecting I would want to reread some of it. Comments like "nice", and "beautiful", and "wow".

At the end if feels more satisfying that many other books I have read, and the journey it brought me on was different. I want to run out and call everyone's attention to it, to cut through the scrambled messages that fill the media and say "This book matters. Read it. Enjoy it."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars dark, gorgeous, and compelling August 13, 2012

By Stephanie Cowell VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I was up very late for two nights unable to put this book down. Set between the rather decent people of a small and ordinary town and the terrifying, child-abusing clan in the mountains above, Our Daily Bread has a compelling, almost scriptural pull between good and evil, those from the town who judge in a stupid but well-meaning way, those who try to help the children, those who are too afraid to do anything. The characters are compelling: principally Tom, a beautifully portrayed father and husband who wants only to live an ordinary good life and Albert, a young man who had grown up in the clan, was bitterly abused, and who can neither stay with them or move away. He is complex, a very old soul in a young man, a young man who never been young. His final realization of what he must do to save the children - and in a way, to save his own soul - is truly terrifying. Lauren B. Davis is not afraid to ask hard questions about decency and loyalty and she does not give us easy answers. The character of Tom's daughter Ivy who must take responsibility far beyond her ten years and the decent proprietor of a small antiques store walk off the page and into your mind. The novel evoked many questions for me about goodness and evil and responsibility. Original and utterly memorable.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This book will stay with you, become part of who you are. March 30, 2012

By Karen J. McLean

Format:Paperback

"Animal, plant, or mineral?"

Seems like an innocent enough question, the opening to a familiar game. Yet if you point out that human beings fall under the "animal" category, many people will bristle. "We aren't animals," they sniff. "We're more evolved than that." And they're right, to a point. But part of that "animal" remains in our "human" nature; it leads us to fear what we don't understand, and to -- on some level -- hate what we fear. We are "better than that," and "keep up with the Joneses," and quick to push others into the mud in order to keep ourselves looking spotless. Survival of the fittest, after all, is part of evolution.

OUR DAILY BREAD by Lauren B. Davis cuts to the root of "us" and "them," of human nature at its best and worst, and all the shades of grey in between. For hundreds of years, the divide between the townspeople of Gideon and the notorious Erskines on North Mountain has been reinforced, generation after generation. It's a hostile and parasitic relationship. Whispers of monstrous things occurring on a daily basis are dismissed by the townspeople -- "Well, what do you expect from the Mountain?" -- while the Erskines are quick to point out (and exploit for material gain) the hypocrisy of the good people of Gideon.

Set against this powder keg are the compelling stories of a young man struggling with his identity, to escape the labels he has worn his whole life, a family in the midst of falling apart, and an older woman whose heart urges her to make a difference even as she tries to mind her own business. These characters live and breathe, are people we recognize from our own lives and are aspects of ourselves. Gideon could be anywhere, really, and deep down we know that: somehow, this could happen to us.... That admission alone would keep the pages turning, but as the stakes get higher and the action speeds up, there is no putting this book down. It demands to be seen through to the end.

OUR DAILY BREAD is a compassionate, insightful and riveting read, but its message lingers long after the last page is turned. There is hope for the hopeless, and those thought to be "too far gone" -- even in their own eyes -- have potential for redemption. Most of all, as human beings, we need to look at each other with kindness rather than judgement, doing our best to subdue the remnants of the beast we all carry within ourselves. Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Greatly Underrated Writer February 6, 2012

By Une Verre du Vin

Format:Paperback

A graceful and empathetic book, full of moments that implode and resound long after you close the book. Lauren B. Davis is one of the best writers today. Period. A previous book, Stubborn Season is highly recommended too.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opening. January 21, 2013

By Melissa B

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Ms. Davis is an awesome writer. I had a hard time putting this book down. The book opened my eyes to how damaging our opinions, stereotypes, and unacceptance of what is unfamiliar can do to people. The book made me think more compassionately until I've walked a mile in another's shoes.