In the Fall - Brossura

Jeffrey Lent is the author of four novels: After You've Gone, A Peculiar Grace, Lost Nation, and In the Fall, which was a national best seller.

"Majestic . . . epic . . . vital . . . a necessary piece in a uniquely American mosaic."--"The New York Times Book Review" A national best-seller and a "New York Times" notable book, Jeffrey Lent's debut novel, "In the Fall," was rapturously hailed by readers and critics alike. "In the Fall" is that rare thing: a truly moving and brilliantly written American family epic. In prose that ranges from earthy to lyrical, Jeffrey Lent conjures the history of three generations born of passion and haunted by the past. At the close of the Civil War, Norman Pelham, son of a Vermont farmer, is found wounded in the woods by Leah, an escaped slave. The two become lovers as Leah nurses Norman back to health, and journey north together as man and wife. But Leah harbors a secret that will rend what the lovers have wrought. Her son, Jamie, escapes rural Vermont and, passing for white, enters the outwardly glamorous world of northern resorts. But he can no more escape the past than could his mother. It is his son, Foster, who discovers what led Leah from a decrepit southern plantation to a bucolic Vermont homestead and back, on a path littered with the sorrows of slavery and obstructed by the unanswered challenges of race. "Right from the start of this engrossing family saga, you know that you're in the hands of a storyteller who knows just where he's going. . . . You can hear echoes of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy in Lent's prose. But the presiding geniuses of this dark novel's painterly, poetic scenes are Robert Frost and the artist Winslow Homer . . . flint-eyed Yankees who never saw a paradise that didn't have a snake."-- "Newsweek" "A stunning success . . . Builds like a thunderstorm coming over the horizon."--"The Christian Science Monitor"