Starting Over

A Country Year and A Book of Bees

A pair of memoirs about a woman starting her life over as a beekeeper in the Ozarks, from “a latter-day Henry Thoreau with a sense of the absurd” (Chicago Tribune).

Taken together, the “steadily eloquent” national bestseller, A Country Year, and its follow-up, A Book of Bees, a New York Times Notable Book, offer a moving and fascinating chronicle of Sue Hubbell’s seasonal second life as a commercial beekeeper (The Washington Post).

Alone on a small Missouri farm after the end of a thirty-year marriage, Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world, as well as in writing about her experience. In evocative vignettes, she takes readers through the seasonal cycle of her life as a beekeeper, offering exquisitely rendered details of hives, harvests, and honey, while also reflecting on deeper questions. As the New York Times wrote: “The real masterwork that Sue Hubbell has created is her life.”