Reading Order
Always Coming Home Reading Order
Always Coming Home (1985) by Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most formally ambitious and unusual novels in American literature — an 'archaeology of the future' that takes the form of a cultural anthropology of the Kesh, a people who will live in the Napa Valley of California at some unknown point far in the future, after the world as we know it has ended. Rather than a conventional novel with a through-plot, Always Coming Home contains poems, stories, songs, maps, drawings, instructions, glossaries, appendices, recipes, plays, and myths — the cultural artifacts of a people who have organized their lives in deliberate opposition to the expansive, hierarchical, violent civilization that preceded them. At the center is a single narrative — the life story of Stone Telling (Ayatyu), a Kesh woman whose father is a man from the Condor People, a militaristic, patriarchal civilization that still maintains the old ways of hierarchy and war. Stone Telling's story is the novel's spine: her childhood among the Kesh, her journey to the Condor land with her father, her experience of life in a patriarchal civilization, and her return. But Always Coming Home is explicitly not just a novel: it is Le Guin's attempt to imagine what a genuinely alternative human civilization would look like in full — not just its political structure but its poetry, its music, its ceremonies, its food, its relationship with the natural world.
Where to start
Always Coming Home — the novel exists in several forms, including a version with a cassette tape of Kesh music that Le Guin made with Todd Barton. The University of California Press 2019 edition is the most accessible current version. The book can be read in any order — some readers follow Stone Telling's narrative straight through, others browse the cultural materials.
Complete Always Coming Home Book List
- 1Buy
Always Coming Home
Ursula K. Le Guin·1985·The novel — the Kesh people's cultural archive and Stone Telling's life story; Le Guin's most formally ambitious book and her most complete attempt to imagine an alternative civilization in all its cultural dimensions. - 2Buy
The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin·1974·Le Guin's Hugo-winning anarchist utopia — the essential predecessor; Anarres is the earlier version of the same political imagination that Always Coming Home extends; the comparison shows how Le Guin's utopian thinking developed over a decade. - 3Buy
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin·1969·Le Guin's Hugo-winning Hainish SF — the companion in Le Guin's thought-experiment mode; where Left Hand speculates about gender, Always Coming Home speculates about what an entire alternative civilization would look like. - 4Buy
A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin·1968·Le Guin's Earthsea debut — the companion in the fantasy mode; the Earthsea Cycle's created cultures are earlier, simpler versions of the cultural world-building that Always Coming Home takes to its most elaborate extreme. - 5Buy
Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler·1993·Butler's near-future dystopia — the companion in speculative fiction set in a future California; Butler's collapsing California is what precedes the Kesh, and Earthseed is the companion to the Kesh's alternative civilization-building. - 6Buy
Woman on the Edge of Time
Marge Piercy·1976·Piercy's feminist utopia — the most important companion in 1970s–80s feminist utopian SF; Mattapoisett (Piercy's future society) and the Kesh are the two most elaborate attempts by feminist SF writers to imagine what an alternative civilization would look like in concrete detail. - 7Buy
The Word for World is Forest
Ursula K. Le Guin·1972·Le Guin's anti-imperialist novella — the predecessor in Le Guin's examination of what non-hierarchical, non-expansive human societies look like; the Athsheans' society is the earlier, simpler version of the Kesh's civilization. - 8Buy
Islandia
Austin Tappan Wright·1942·Wright's elaborate fictional country — the predecessor in American literature of the fully realized alternative civilization as a novel's project; Islandia's detailed culture, geography, and social system is the main earlier American example of what Always Coming Home attempts at much greater ambition.
Always Coming Home — Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of book is Always Coming Home?
Always Coming Home resists easy genre categorization. It is usually classified as science fiction (it imagines a future Californian civilization) but is formally unlike most SF novels. It is an 'archaeology of the future' — a collection of cultural artifacts, narratives, poems, songs, recipes, instructions, maps, drawings, and stories attributed to the Kesh people, organized as if an anthropologist had assembled the complete cultural record of a people. Within this larger cultural archive, there is a single sustained narrative: Stone Telling's autobiography, the story of a Kesh woman whose father is from the Condor People (a militaristic, patriarchal civilization) and who travels to the Condor land and back. Always Coming Home was published with a cassette tape of Kesh music (composed by Todd Barton); recent editions include a code to access the music online.
Who are the Kesh and what is Le Guin's vision of their civilization?
The Kesh are a people who will live in the Napa Valley of California at some unknown point in the far future, after the collapse of industrial civilization. Their society is organized around the opposite principles from industrial civilization: they are not expansive (they have defined boundaries and do not seek to grow), not hierarchical (their social structure is not a pyramid but a web), not oriented toward accumulation (they practice forms of gift economy), and not separated from the natural world (their civilization is designed to fit within its ecological context rather than to dominate it). Their name for expansive, hierarchical civilization is 'the Condor people,' and the Kesh's relationship with the Condor remnant in the novel is always one of active resistance and opposition. Le Guin's vision of the Kesh is not a primitive society but a sophisticated one that has made different choices.
What is Stone Telling's story?
Stone Telling (Ayatyu) is a Kesh woman whose father, Terter Abhao, is a man from the Condor People who came to the Kesh Valley on a scouting mission, had a relationship with her mother (Towhee), and left before Stone Telling was born. Stone Telling grows up without a father, which is a social mark in Kesh society (which is matrilineal and organized around the mother's household). When her father returns to claim her as his daughter and bring her back to the Condor land, she goes — partly from curiosity, partly from a desire to know him. Her experience in the Condor land is the novel's feminist argument: the Condor civilization is patriarchal, hierarchical, militaristic, and treats women as property. Stone Telling's return to the Kesh, after years away, is the novel's emotional resolution.
How does Always Coming Home relate to Le Guin's other work?
Always Coming Home is the most elaborate expression of the political imagination that Le Guin had been developing across her career. The Dispossessed (1974) imagined an anarchist society through a novel with a through-plot; Always Coming Home imagines an anarchist, ecological society through an entire cultural archive. The Kesh's principles (non-expansion, non-hierarchy, ecological integration) are the same as Anarres's, but the form in which Le Guin imagines them is much more elaborate and culturally complete. Le Guin has described Always Coming Home as the book she most wanted to write and the hardest to write; it took her many years and a collaboration with the composer Todd Barton and illustrator Margaret Chodos-Irvine. It is considered by many Le Guin scholars to be her most ambitious single work.
What should I read after Always Coming Home?
After Always Coming Home, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are the most important companions in Le Guin's political imagination. For Le Guin's Earthsea cycle, A Wizard of Earthsea is the starting point. For the feminist utopian SF tradition Always Coming Home belongs to, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Joanna Russ's The Female Man are the most important companions. For recent SF that continues Le Guin's ecological and political project, Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge and N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy are significant.
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