In the Fall

This is the tale of three generations of an American family, the dark secrets at its core, and the forbidden transcendent love affairs that fuel the characters over the course of six decades, from the Civil War to the edge of the depression.

Literature & Fiction

LENT, Jeffrey

Contemporary

Picador

In The Fall

Vintage Books

Lost Nation

Genre Fiction

Atlantic Monthly Press

Compared by critics to William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, Jeffrey Lent’s In the Fall is the most stunning debut to come along in years. Ambitious in scope and passionately executed, this epic novel is the rarest of things: a truly moving, emotionally honest, and intellectually satisfying American family. In the twilight of the Civil War, Leah, an escaped slave, discovers Norman Pelham, a wounded soldier who lies dying in a battlefield outside Richmond. After she nurses him back to health, Norman brings her to his family farm in Vermont as his wife, and they begin a family. Now the mother of three, and however begrudgingly, accepted in the community, Leah travels back to the South of her birth and returns with a secret that threatens to destroy what she and Norman had created. Her son Jamie, passing for white, escapes his legacy and enters a world of petty bootlegging, achieving a kind of respectability in the Prohibition era, but also suffering wrenching losses. At the eve of the Great Depression his son, Foster, retraces the path taken by his grandmother and finally confronts the secret exposed by an unknown white uncle, the legacy of slavery, and the painful intricacies of race.

In the Fall: A Novel

United States

Vintage

Majestic . . . epic . . . vital . . . a necessary piece in a uniquely American mosaic.”The New York Times Book Review 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 national bestseller and a New York Times notable book, now in Grove Press paperback for the first time, In the Fall is a richly layered epic that conjures the history of three generations of an American family and the dark secrets that blister at its core. At the close of the Civil War, Norman Pelham, son of a Vermont farmer, is found wounded by Leah, an escaped slave harboring a devastating secret. The two become lovers as Leah nurses Norman back to health, and journey north together as man and wife. Their son forsakes the family for the anonymous world of bootlegging and nightclubs, but long-buried truths come to light when their grandson is driven to retrace his history and disentangle his complicated inheritance. Spanning the post-Civil War era to the edge of the Great Depression, In the Fall is a fierce, gripping vision of an American landscape and history, and an unforgettable portrait of an American family. A stunning success . . . Builds like a thunderstorm coming over the horizon.”The Christian Science Monitor

GROVE PRESS

Lost Nation delves beneath the bright, promising veneer of early-nineteenth-century New England to unveil a startling parable of individualism and nationhood. The novel opens with a man known as Blood, guiding an oxcart of rum toward the wild country of New Hampshire, an ungoverned territory called the Indian Stream -- a land where the luckless or outlawed have made a fresh start. Blood is a man of contradictions, of learning and wisdom, but also a man with a secret past that has scorched his soul. He sets forth to establish himself as a trader, hauling with him Sally, a sixteen-year-old girl won from the madam of a brothel over a game of cards. Their arrival in the Indian Stream triggers an escalating series of clashes that serves to sever the master/servant bond between them, and offers both a second chance with life. But as the conflicts within the community spill over and attract the attention of outside authorities, Blood becomes a target to those seeking easy blame for their troubles. As plots unravel and violence escalates, two young men of uncertain identity appear, and Blood is forced to confront dreaded apparitions of his past, while Sally is offered a final escape.

Lost Nation: A Novel

An unforgettable tale of love, family secrets, and the hold of the past in a family of New England artists, A Peculiar Grace is the latest triumph from the author of In the Fall, hailed by The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times as one of the best books of the year. Hewitt Pearce lives alone in his family home, producing custom ironwork and safeguarding a small collection of art his late father left behind. When Jessica, a troubled young vagabond, washes up in his backwoods one morning, Hewitt’s hermetic existence is challenged. As he gradually uncovers Jessica’s secrets and reestablishes contact with a woman he thought he had lost twenty years before, Hewitt must confront his own dark history and rediscover how much he craves human connection. A Peculiar Grace is a remarkable achievement by one of our finest authors, an insightful portrait of family secrets, and a rich tapestry filled with characters who have learned to survive by giving shape to their losses.

A Peculiar Grace: A Novel

After You’ve Gone in paperback, it is a moving, sublime love story set in the cataclysmic decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Henry Dorn has spent years building a family, but it only takes a single afternoon for it to fall apart. Abruptly widowed of the love of his life, Henry buys a steamer ticket for Amsterdam, the city of his heritage, hoping to start life anew. But nothing could have prepared him for the woman he meets on the ship: the fiery, self-sufficient Lydia Pearce, one of a new generation of women. Before long the two have fallen into an affair of a depth and significance for which neither was prepared. But the memory of his wife and the vexed relationship he had with their son haunt Henry in the midst of his new beginning. Jeffrey Lent is one of our finest novelists, and After You’ve Gone delivers a tale that beautifully charts the sweep of a life, the grim reach of a war, and the discoveryand lossof life-defining love

After You've Gone: A Novel

An interracial relationship at the end of the Civil War between a Union soldier and a runaway slave initiates a haunting family legacy of war, racism, and secrets that follows three generations from the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression. A first novel. 100,000 first printing. $200,000 ad/promo. BOMC Main. QPB.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LENT, Jeffrey. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by LENT, Jeffrey

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LENT, Jeffrey. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

In the Fall

In The Fall

Lost Nation

In the Fall: A Novel

In The Fall

In the Fall

Lost Nation: A Novel

A Peculiar Grace: A Novel

After You've Gone: A Novel

In the Fall