Amanda Coplin · 2012 · exile

Amanda Coplin's 2012 debut, set in the Wenatchee valley of central Washington around the turn of the century. A solitary orchardist takes in two runaway pregnant girls, and what follows sends one of them on a lifelong drift north and south across the state - through mining camps, horse country and finally the penitentiary at Walla Walla.

1. 1
   The orchard

   A homestead of apple and apricot trees in the Wenatchee valley, where Talmadge has lived alone for forty years since his sister walked into the woods - and where two starving, pregnant runaway girls begin stealing his fruit.

2. 2
   Peshastin

   Where the family sold fruit to the miners in the earliest years, up the creek from the orchard - one of the small central Washington names the book uses without explanation, because it assumes you know the valley.

3. 3
   Icicle

   The trading post where they took supplies, at the mouth of the creek below what is now Leavenworth - and the field where the Nez Perce wranglers camped each summer with two hundred horses and said nothing to anybody.

4. 4
   Wenatchee

   The town at the confluence, and the fruit industry taking shape around it - Coplin was born here among her grandfather's orchards, and Talmadge is drawn from him.

5. 5
   Chelan

   The foot of the lake, and the boat landing - the point at which the novel stops being about one valley and starts following Della north into country where the law is a matter of distance.

6. 6
   Stehekin

   Fifty miles up Lake Chelan with no road in, then or now - the ferry still runs, and the isolation of the place is the point: it is where you go when you do not want to be reached.

7. 7
   Conconully

   The Okanogan mining country and Ruby City, where Della goes hunting the man who kept her and her sister - a wrangler by then, and by the end of it a woman with a rifle and a purpose nobody can talk her out of.

8. 8
   Ellensburg

   South through the Kittitas valley on the horse circuit, in the last years when a young woman could disappear into that work - the drift that carries Della further from the orchard every season.

9. 9
   Walla Walla

   The state penitentiary, where Della ends up and where Talmadge and Angelene come to see her - an old man crossing his own state to visit a prison, having spent his life trying to make a family out of people who kept leaving.

10. 10
    The orchard

    Angelene inherits the trees and the work, and keeps them - the last pages being about pruning and grafting and the slow business of tending something, which is what the book has been about all along.