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Grove's jacket copy for Lost Nation:
From the best-selling author Jeffrey Lent, Lost Nation is a tour de force novel. Impelled by sensuous prose and atmospheric storytelling, 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 is a vivid tale of unexpected strengths, terrible and sad misconceptions, and the yearning toward civil society in a landscape raw and with little pity for human strivings. In prose both lucid and seductive, it carries us deeply into human and natural conditions of extreme desolation and harrowing hardship, but also the relentless beat of hope and, finally, the redeeming capacity of love. |
Praise for Lost Nation:
“A memorable journey into [a] remarkable novel . . . The power of Lost Nation lies in the author’s unique use of language, in both the written and the spoken patois of early-nineteenth-century New England. Lent’s first novel, In the Fall, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2000. This is his second and should garner equal praise. . . . Grade: A-.”
—William Dieter, Rocky Mountain News
“[This] intensely charged . . . mesmerizing tale . . . [shows a] remarkable command of atmosphere and gift for flinty, stark characterizations. Blood is a magnificently dramatic figure, Lear-like in his stoical resolve and the fury that consumes him.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Lent’s Lost Nation shows that his talent has staying power. His carefully crafted but hardscrabble prose is like a rutted country road carving out its own literary territory. . . . A tale of sin, shame, death and redemption that’s as compelling as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and as true as Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides . . . Just as the deeply hidden truths of Blood’s life contrast with the precision of his ledgerbook entries, the author challenges our own paper record of the American frontier: What did it really require to be the last man—or woman--or culture, standing?”
—Martin Northway, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“With his new novel, Lost Nation, Jeffrey Lent has proven that there are second acts in American literature. Following on the success of his first novel, In the Fall, Lent has produced a second book with the same sort of tragic power and dignity. . . . He is a writer of such breathtaking talent and honesty that one feels compelled to group him with the greats of American literature. But, finally, he stands alone, as all true writers do. . . . A novel of brutal originality. The whole book has a sort of power and heartbreaking truth to it, a quality of something long forgotten and now remembered with brilliant clarity.”
—Michael Pearson, Bookpage
“A memorable journey into [a] remarkable novel . . . The power of Lost Nation lies in the author’s unique use of language, in both the written and the spoken patois of early-nineteenth-century New England. Lent’s first novel, In the Fall, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2000. This is his second and should garner equal praise. . . . Grade: A-.”
—William Dieter, Rocky Mountain News
“[This] intensely charged . . . mesmerizing tale . . . [shows a] remarkable command of atmosphere and gift for flinty, stark characterizations. Blood is a magnificently dramatic figure, Lear-like in his stoical resolve and the fury that consumes him.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Lent’s Lost Nation shows that his talent has staying power. His carefully crafted but hardscrabble prose is like a rutted country road carving out its own literary territory. . . . A tale of sin, shame, death and redemption that’s as compelling as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and as true as Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides . . . Just as the deeply hidden truths of Blood’s life contrast with the precision of his ledgerbook entries, the author challenges our own paper record of the American frontier: What did it really require to be the last man—or woman--or culture, standing?”
—Martin Northway, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“With his new novel, Lost Nation, Jeffrey Lent has proven that there are second acts in American literature. Following on the success of his first novel, In the Fall, Lent has produced a second book with the same sort of tragic power and dignity. . . . He is a writer of such breathtaking talent and honesty that one feels compelled to group him with the greats of American literature. But, finally, he stands alone, as all true writers do. . . . A novel of brutal originality. The whole book has a sort of power and heartbreaking truth to it, a quality of something long forgotten and now remembered with brilliant clarity.”
—Michael Pearson, Bookpage