Societal expectations can lead one to believe that somehow, we’ll know what we want to do with our lives upon reaching adulthood, when the reality is that many, or even most, of us will never figure it out. We may even find ourselves at middle age just trying to keep things together; our families, our relationships, our finances, our bodies; our sanity. It can be tempting to keep it all bottled inside, leaving us to feel alone in our anxieties when the whole time, if we’d just reached out to our fellow humans we may have found that help, or at least companionship, was never far away. Such is the lesson learned by Miles Krzelewski in Daniel Mason’s utterly delightful Country People.

When Miles’ wife Kate is offered a visiting professorship at a prestigious Vermont college he is quick to support the idea, happily packing son Wesley, daughter Olive, and dog Giuseppe into their car for the cross-country trip from California. Kate and the kids take to their new situation immediately, but Miles finds himself feeling somewhat adrift. Sure, he enjoys walking with Giuseppe through the woods around the house they’re staying in, but his hopes of finally finishing his oft-refocused graduate thesis keep getting pushed aside as he struggles to make himself feel useful, all the while not noticing how valuable his loved ones already find him.

Miles forays into the community, making acquaintances and then friends with the variously quirky locals, picking up new obsessions, and even beginning to have fun, all under the flimsy guise of conducting “research” for his paper. Mason’s sense of humor really shines through in these encounters and adventures, inspiring more than a few genuine laughs in the reader, but his deep love for his characters—and one could argue for humanity itself—means that any jokes made at their expense come from a place of affection.

During these encounters, Miles repeatedly hears talk of an unusual local legend and while his and Kate’s skepticism initially prevents him from looking into it, eventually it manages to pique his interest, sending him down a rabbit hole and beginning to wonder if it might be true. With his need for purpose and camaraderie having hitherto been largely unfulfilled he becomes wrapped up in conspiratorial thinking, but is it so bad to do so when said conspiracy is ultimately harmless and the end result is genuine human connection?

Simultaneously a breezy delight and a thoughtful exploration of making friends at middle age, Country People is a true highlight of 2026. It may not be able to reach the heights of Mason’s previous novel, the unique and sprawling mini-epic North Woods, but in its focus on the relatably adrift Miles and the cavalcade of lovably loony locals he meets this novel is one of the most purely enjoyable reads of the year. Capably merging the humorous with the profound (when browsing Amazon for a training collar for Giuseppe, Miles observes, “the collar, made by a company with an all-caps name consisting of letters that seemed randomly selected from the alphabet, had 39,435 five-star reviews, yielding an average of 4.9; greater than Anna Karenina, greater than anything by Shakespeare, greater than Bach.”), he lets us ponder some of modern life’s less desirable developments while still chuckling over them. Read this book and let yourself fall in love with this town; this is one to cherish. ★★★★★