Amanda Coplin was born in Wenatchee, Washington. She received her BA from the University of Oregon and MFA from the University of Minnesota. She is a recipient of a Whiting Award in Fiction and has been awarded residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the Omi International Arts Center at Ledig House in Ghent, New York. The Orchardist (2012), her first book, is set in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century. The novel won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and was named a best book of the year by National Public Radio, Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post. Coplin lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is at work on her second novel.
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The OrchardistA Novel
There were times when the girls knew where the man was in the orchard, and times they did not. These times they trod slowly and carefully, not that they thought he would harm them—not really—but it had become a kind of game. You might turn the corner into an orchard row and find him there, walking toward you or away, or maybe you saw his legs, his trunk, obscured in leaves.
The Orchardist :A Novel -
The OrchardistA Novel
She sat on a blue velvet-cushioned stool. A man she could not see—he was in the ink-black darkness before her—told her to hold very still. He was taking her picture. Did she know what that meant? Don’t move your mouth, he said. Sit still. Try not to blink.
The Orchardist :A Novel -
The OrchardistA Novel
She stole a horse in a neighboring town—it was easy enough, outside a tavern at night—and discovered the nest morning, having ridden the better part of the night, a venison sandwich in the saddlebags and, sewn into a handkerchief and stuffed into a hidden pocket, bills of money.
The Orchardist :A Novel
"The Orchardist is a stunning accomplishment, hypnotic in its storytelling power, by turns lyrical and gritty, and filled with marvels. Coplin displays a dazzling sense of craftsmanship, and a talent for creating characters vivid and true." —NPR
"Amanda Coplin’s somber, majestic debut arrives like an urgent missive from another century. Life and death, loss and recovery, failure and redemption, Coplin reminds us that these opposites are woven together in the fabric of human experience." —The Washington Post [on The Orchardist]
“[A] beautiful, powerful novel . . . The Orchardist has the sweep and scope of a big historical novel . . . yet Coplin is exquisitely attuned to small, interior revolutions as well. Its language as rooted and plain as the apple trees Talmadge nurtures, this is a gorgeous first book.” —The Boston Globe
“The Orchardist is magical and uncannily atmospheric, deeply imagined and fully sustained. It is a complex, compelling, polyphonic, subtle and remarkably accomplished novel—a fully orchestrated work, from the microscopic elements of sentence rhythm and image to the macroscopic elements of character and plot. Though the book feels fresh and unexpected, Ms. Coplin has an uncanny maturity of voice and historical reach.”