Novel: Always Coming Home

Overview
Always Coming Home presents a far-future California after industrial civilization has receded, imagining the daily life, art, ritual, and history of the Kesh, a people of the Napa Valley. Rather than a single linear plot, the book gathers myths, poems, plays, recipes, maps, songs, and ethnographic notes around a central life story. The mosaic form builds a culture from the inside out, letting a reader inhabit a way of living oriented to place, reciprocity, and the long view of time.

Form and World
The Valley’s climate has shifted and seas have risen, but the land endures. The Kesh live in small towns and farmsteads, practice careful agriculture and foraging, and use light, decentralized technologies, solar, handcraft, and an information-and-trade network known simply as the Exchange. Their world is neither a return to the past nor an extrapolation of high-tech futures. It is a post-industrial, post-imperial landscape where memory and invention mingle, and where culture is the primary technology.

Stone Telling
At the book’s heart is the life narrative of Stone Telling, a woman born to a Kesh mother and a father from a distant, conquering people the Kesh call the Condor. As a girl she grows up in the Valley’s open households, learning stories, dances, and crafts. When her father reappears and claims her, she journeys over the mountains to his homeland, where her name is changed and her freedom constrained. She witnesses a society structured by hierarchy, martial discipline, and a jealous monotheism; women are sequestered, dissent is punished, and conquest is a creed.

Stone Telling’s account of marriage, motherhood, and gradual disillusion in the Condor stronghold provides the narrative spine. Enduring hardship, she escapes and makes the arduous return to the Valley. There she reclaims her Kesh name and kin, raises her child, and reflects on the terms of belonging. Her tale anchors the book’s ethnography in lived stakes, contrasting two incompatible imaginations of power and home.

The Kesh
Kesh society is organized around households and Houses of craft and study, with matrilineal kinship and fluid roles for gender and work. Ceremony and art are woven into subsistence: seasonal festivals, communal songs, and theater give shape to labor and time. Their symbol, the heyiya-if, a double spiral, figures balance among the living, the dead, and the more-than-human. The Kesh speak of animals and places as persons with whom one negotiates, and keep a capacious sense of the sacred without creed or priesthood. Learning is lifelong; knowledge passes through apprenticeships, story, and dance as much as through formal teaching.

The Condor People
The Condor represent a recurring temptation toward purity, centralized command, and violent transcendence. Their empire rises on discipline, slavery, and extraction, and it cannot endure the ecological and social limits of the world it seeks to rule. Calamities, disease, internal revolt, and the earth’s own movements, break its hold. The Valley outlasts them not by counterconquest but by attention to place and refusal of domination.

Frame and Voice
Threaded throughout is the voice of Pandora, a collector and editor who converses with Kesh informants, argues with herself, and questions the ethics of representation. Her notes, glossaries, maps, and “Back of the Book” situate songs and stories, while also exposing the distance between observer and lived culture. The frame keeps the book porous, self-aware, and hospitable to ambiguity.

Themes
The book asks what it would mean to make a home after catastrophe, and proposes that culture, shared art, ritual, and work, can be a durable commons. It contrasts domination with reciprocity, abstraction with attention, and purity with mixture. Utopia appears not as blueprint but as practice: fallible, plural, and local, forever in the act of always coming home.