Holy the Firm

From Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a book about the grace, beauty, and terror of the natural world.

In the mid 1970s, Annie Dillard spent two years on an island in Puget Sound in a room with a solitary window, a cat, and a spider for company, asking herself questions about memory, time, sacrifice, reality, death, and God. Holy the Firm, the diary-like collection of her thoughts, feelings, and ruminations during this time, is a lyrical gift to any reader who have ever wondered how best to live with grace and wonder in the natural world.

[This] is a book of great richness, beauty and power and thus very difficult to do justice to in a brief review…The violence is sometimes unbearable, the language rarely less than superb. Dillard’s description of the moth’s death makes Virginia Woolf’s go dim and Edwardian. Nature seen so clear and hard that the eyes tear…A rare and precious book. — Freferick Buechner, New York Times Book Review