Searoad is a sandy track that runs between the town of Klatsand and the rugged Oregon coast.

Across this stretch, locals with roots in the town overlap with visitors staying in its run-down motels: a man questions his wife’s desire to be a poet; a summering librarian indulges in an affair; a waitress recalls the shooting of her teenage daughter by her own husband. And always, women walk on the long, long beach.

And as the narrative shifts from the horizontal present to the vertical past, a four-generation chain of mothers and daughters reaches back to Klatsand’s beginnings – and forward to its future.

In Searoad, trailblazing feminist author Ursula K. Le Guin paints a vivid and powerfully evocative portrait of a small community built over the course of a century.