In Coop, the author of Population 485 and Truck: A Love Story plumbs his unorthodox past (he was raised in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect by city-bred parents who took in over 100 foster children) for clues as to how he should proceed as a farmer and a parent. Whether describing his family (”I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon”) or what it’s like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig (”two firsts in one day”), Coop is filled with Michael Perry’s trademark humor, but in the course of a year in which the birth of his child is balanced by the death of a dear friend and worse, he also writes from the quieter corners of his heart.

“In less talented hands, the stories he recounts in Coop would merely have been the subject of an unusually busy holiday letter. But in Perry’s engrossing narration, they take on the heft of history.”-Christian Science Monitor