Author: Stephen Billias

A Book of Fields is a collection of stories about the men and women of the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts. Each story takes its name from a town that ends in “field”—Ashfield, Deerfield, Greenfield and so forth. Each story has character types and locales from the towns that will be recognizable to anyone who has spent any time in the area. A few of the stories share characters.

Almost every story deals with a crime, or something like a crime, but this is not a crime novel. It’s a book about the good people of the Pioneer Valley; the crimes are merely an entry point into their lives. Taken together, the stories in A Book of Fields are a portrait of a world that is rapidly disappearing—the lush farms and fields of the Connecticut River basin shrinking every year, and the agricultural way of life giving way to suburbia. The people change as the land use changes.

This book is about this time, right now, this place, and the hardy, independent, passionate, hardheaded, sometimes a little bit crazy people who live there.