June’s Title Pick for Adults: Stand By Me by Wendell Berry

I remember very well joining an online Shared reading session for staff during one of the Covid lockdowns and reading a short section from the title story in Wendell Berry’s collection Stand By Me. In this extract, the narrator keeps company with a father who has just learned that his son Tom, a soldier in the Second World War, has been killed in action.

‘For a long time neither one of us moved. The daily sounds of the world went on, sparrows in the barn lot, somebody’s bull way off, the wind in the eaves, but around us was this awful, awful silence that didn’t have one word in it.

I looked at Jarrat finally. He was standing there blind as a statue. He had Tom’s life all inside him now […] Now it was complete. Now it was finished.’

The sorrow and grief experienced by these characters felt palpable, even in the strange online space of a Zoom meeting room. These feelings are so simply expressed as to be inescapable, and there is no simple consolation offered for the loss of Tom, but somehow, shared between a small group of readers, it was possible to break the ‘awful, awful silence’ that can surround grief and loss, and speak about those things together. And, as can often happen, particularly in a Shared Reading group, finding language and utterance of those things makes them easier to bear.

‘It’s our separateness and our grief that break the world in two. Back when Tom got killed and the word came, had never thought of such things. That time would have been hard enough, even if I had thought of them. Because I hadn’t, it was harder.’

That reading experience stayed with me, so I was glad to revisit the rest of the collection when it was selected for our Reader Bookshelf 2026. The stories in Stand By Me overlap and intertwine, bringing the inhabitants of the rural Kentucky town of Port William to life as they grow from childhood to old age, and share joys, frustrations, relationships and sorrows. In recent Shared Reading groups I’ve read the story ‘Making It Home’, which is about one of Tom’s contemporaries from Port William who does survive the war, and we follow him as he travels home. We’ve read about an encounter during the Great Depression in ‘The Solemn Boy’ and an old family man’s decline in ‘That Distant Land’. The stories are certainly not all solemn or sad, but they take the lives of all their characters seriously, and are written with such love and attention as to make any sad moments bearable, and infinitely rewarding to speak about.

by Frances Macmillan, Literature Engagement Lead