A New Song (The Mitford Years, Book 5)

By Jan Karon

Book Overview

Jan Karon's millions of fans can't wait to sit down with her heartwarming and hilarious characters, who have a way of becoming family. In fact, readers and booksellers across the country kept Out to Canaan and At Home in Mitford on The New York Times bestseller list for months. In A New Song , Mitford's longtime Episcopal priest, Father Tim, retires. However, new challenges and adventures await when he agrees to serve as interim minister of a small church on Whitecap Island. He and his wife, Cynthia, soon find that Whitecap has its own unforgettable characters: a church organist with a mysterious past, a lovelorn bachelor placing personal ads, a mother battling paralyzing depression. They also find that Mitford is never far away when circumstances "back home" keep their phone ringing off the hook. In this fifth novel of the beloved series, fans old and new will discover that a trip to Mitford and Whitecap is twice as good for the soul. "Everything that, in the wee hours of the night, you like a book to be, warm-hearted and funny, with a hero marked by...profound inner strength" -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670878103
• ISBN13: 9780670878109
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Viking Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

White Cap Island here I come

This book was recommended by a friend and from the first page I was hooked. I moved right along with the rector and his wife and loved their new parish and missed their old one even though I hadn't met the folks in Mitford. I felt like I had been a part of their lives since the beginning. Ms. Karon draws you into the goings on and by the books end you want to know more about your friends.

Homesick for Mitford

Having always been a homebody, I identified right away with Father Tim & Cynthia when they left their precious Mitford to go to Whitecap. What an adventure they had. I enjoyed every sentence of this book. Are there really people like Father Tim and Cynthia in this world? How I wish I could be their friend and neighbor. I gleaned scriptural knowledge and human knowledge from all of Jan's Mitford books. The ending of"A New Song" has me baffled indeed. Who is the man in the pearly white shirt? Could it be an angel perhaps? I will sit and sleep restlessly waiting for Jan's next book.

A real delight....

A New Song continues the delightful travel through the rest of their lives of Fr. Tim and Cynthia Kavanaugh. Those who think that the cryptic ending indicates that Fr. Tim has gone home to the Lord are in error. At least the author says so in several interviews I have read. "Why would I do that?", she asks. The next book is to be the story of their wedding. This was passed over rather quickly in an earlier book, but now we will get to attend. Moving to the coast of N. Carolina from the mountains to be the interim priest at St. John's, Fr. Tim find a church and a community much in need of him and God's healing grace. I won't detail all of the new characters or what has happened to some of the Mitford people. Buy it, enyoy it, and savor the wisdom and insight that it contains.

Another excellent story by Karon

The Mitford books, and now a Whitecap book, have been a surprising and wonderful stroll through a different layer of life than most people experience -- or at least take note of. A New Song continues a great tradition. Everybody knew from the beginning who took the bronze statue, but it was a very moving chapter when it was resolved, even if one is a little dumbfounded that Fr. Tim didn't figure out who took it. My questions: So is it in bk 6 or 7 that Lace and Dooley make it to the altar? Will Dooley's birth father be there? Will Buck punch him out? Will Morris be the organist? Will Fr. Tim be there, or will he (or Cynthia) have gone home (could we stand the poignancy)? Thanks for the great and fresh spiritual writing, Jan Karon. And thanks even more to my own mother, for sharing this series with me.