Searoad is a sandy track that runs between the town of Klatsand and the Pacific Ocean. Along Searoad you can meet the people who live in the little town and the people who come to stay for a night or a week’s vacation in one of the motels—Hanna’s Hideaway, the White Gull, and the Ship Ahoy. If you turn east, inland, off Searoad you might come to Lily Herne’s little house on Hemlock Street, where she brought up her illegitimate daughter, or you might find your way to Bill Weisler’s pottery above the creek, or you might get a good lunch at the Dancing Sand Dab.

If you went there in 1898 you might not find much but a few muddy streets, a lot of spruce trees, and a herd of elk; but then they built the Exposition Hotel, in 1906, where young Jane Herne fell in love with the manager. And all through the twentieth century you’ll find a Hambleton running Hambleton’s Market, on Main.

If you follow Searoad north you’ll come to Breton Head, where Virginia Herne lives now. South, you’ll pass the Inman house on the way toward Wreck Point. But if you turn west from Searoad across the dunes you’ll find only the long, long beach where the rain women walk and the foam women blow in the wind, at the continent’s edge, the beginning of the sea.

In her first completely mainstream book of fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin demonstrates why she is a major American novelist in any category.