商品簡介
A horse may be a worker's livelihood, a pig a piece of property, yet both can also become companions whose treatment exposes the loyalties and cruelties of rural life. Across eighteen separately titled prose pieces, ordinary people in the Savonian countryside confront the pressures of poverty, debt and social rank while remaining bound to farms, crofts, fields and forests by labour, memory and attachment. Household disagreements and generational tensions unfold beside the recurring demands of agricultural and forest work. Crofters, small farmers, labourers, children and elderly people inhabit communities where cooperation is necessary, hierarchy shapes daily relations, and departure from home carries its own weight. Family conflict stands alongside the possibility of reconciliation, while seasonal customs and changing ways of life reveal the strain between inherited traditions and modernisation. Brief excursions into city life and military barracks widen the perspective without displacing the rural world that anchors the collection. Stories, personal recollections and lyrical or reflective sketches create a varied portrait of farm life, moving between social observation and remembered experience. Lake shores, village interiors and working land provide the settings for encounters shaped by scarcity, responsibility and belonging. Rather than centring a single hero, the collection gives attention to many lives, including conscripts and farm workers, and to the animals that share both their labour and emotional world. This book was out of print for decades and is now republished by Alpha Editions. It has been restored for today's and future generations. This edition is not just a reprint - it's a collector's item and a cultural treasure.
