When the son of a nearby neighbor brings a plate of food to a local farmer during the Christmas holiday season in the late 70's, he is shocked to believe that the farmer might have wanted to end his life by freezing to death.While the farmer's son fires up the old woodstove in the room he is in and brings in wood, he asks about an old black and white photograph of a short, stout woman he has seen pinned on the wall. The farmer tells him the history of his family and the farming community that was established when his grandfather came back from the Civil War.And he goes back home imagining how it might have been and remembers his own early teenage years on Mt. Lake in northwestern Connecticut as a way of life he and the farmer have lost. A beautiful, wide-reaching story of the families who live and die in Upland, a bucolic American setting in decline. A lasting image from Sadi's novel is the cloud of dust that remains hanging in the air after a host of characters leave Upland, the small farming community at the center of the author's moving, meditative piece of fictional family history. KIRKUS DISCOVERIES January 11, 2008 MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW: 5 Stars. January 13, 2009. A riveting story, sure to please readers of literary fiction. Every place his its origin story. "Jenford: A Short History of Upland" tells two stories, drawing a long and storied picture of two times in a small rural town, with many differences and parallels between them. An old farmer recalls how his grandfather founded the township and his neighbor remembers his own teenage year, showing that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Jenford is a personal story about a time in my life when I was 13, when my mother took me and my young sister up to a mountaintop in north/western Connecticut to live after she separated from my stepfather. It was just a two-room summer cottage we lived in at first with no running water or bathroom. I would then have to get our water from the brook that ran through the property while she added onto it with a regular bathroom and living room. During that time, while I was attending the local elementary school, I got to know the people who lived there, just as different and unique as those in Jenford, and came to appreciate the self-sufficiency of the last remaining farming brothers who still lived there then. When the son of a nearby neighbor brings a plate of food to a local farmer during the Christmas holiday season in the late 70's, he is shocked to believe that the farmer might have wanted to end his life by freezing to death.While the farmer's son fires up the old wood stove in the room he is in and brings in wood, he asks about an old black and white photograph of a short, stout woman he has seen pinned on the wall. The farmer tells him the history of his family and the farming community that was established when his grandfather came back from the Civil War.And he goes back home imagining how it might have been and remembers his own early teenage years on Mt. Lake in northwestern Connecticut as a way of life he and the farmer have lost. My name is Hendrik Sadi. I grew up in southern Norway in the 1940s and lived in Cairo, Egypt, Istanbul, Turkey and Beirut, Lebanon in that order between the ages of 10 to 13. I served in the US Coast Guard for 4 years when I was seventeen and attended Columbia University where I also worked as a research technician in the late 1960s. I have always loved reading fiction throughout my life and have been influenced a lot in my writing by William Faulkner and Knut Hamsun, though I did not start seriously writing until I was in my late thirties when I wrote my first novel, Kickapoo. I invite you to visit me at my website ernholder.com. Thank you.