Acclaimed Idaho novelist Carol Ryrie Brink had one remaining unpublished manuscript at the time of her death in 1981, the one people in Idaho had been awaiting for years. She called it A Chain of Hands.

“We all reach out to each other to give and receive,” she wrote in the book’s first chapter. “I like to think that the touch of life continues from the deep, dark origin or man forward into the deep, dark future. I touch another human being; but behind me was my mother’s touch and all of those she touched; and behind her and behind her and behind her all the countless millions of seeking hands that touched, transmitting the mystery of a shared experience.”

In this moving and wonderfully written reminiscence, published now for the first time, this accomplished author has detailed many of the hands that touched hers; the lives that transmitted the mystery of shared experience. For the first time, Brink reveals in non-fiction form the people, places, and events that played so prominently in her fictional books for both adults and children.

Carol Ryrie Brink wrote more than thirty books. Her most acclaimed work, Caddie Woodlawn, won the Newberry Medal as the outstanding contribution to children’s literature in 1936, one of several awards she garnered over a long and productive writing career, including the National League of American Pen Women Fiction Award for Snow in the River. Born in Moscow, Idaho, in 1895, many of her works are set in northern Idaho and eastern Washington. Her widely hailed adult trilogy of novels about the region, Buffalo Coat (1944), Strangers in the Forest (1959), and Snow in the River (1964) has been reissued by the Washington State University Press as companions to this first edition of A Chain of Hands.
 
(200 pages)