“Family-fracturing secrets are at the heart of Lent’s luminous third novel, a transcendent story about the healing power of love and art…. This sympathetic depiction of a decent man wrestling with his demons while deciding whether to revive an old love or open himself to a new lover is … magisterial and beautifully written.” --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Jeffrey Lent's first novel, In the Fall, earned him comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner. With Lost Nation, we'll have to go back a little further, say, to Euripides...(a) remarkable tragedy." -- The Christian Science Monitor
"Majestic . . . epic . . . vital . . . a necessary piece in a uniquely American mosaic." --The New York Times Book Review
"Gorgeous prose, searching intelligence, and keen understanding of our tangled attachments to the past and each other...As usual, this gifted writer aims to challenge, not to console." --The Washington Post
Photographs by Esther Haynes Lent
The New York Times best selling author
"Jeffrey Lent is an honest writer, one brave enough to offer up a man's soul stripped of anything that might protect it...a passionate novelist whose graceful peculiarity only makes his work all the richer."
-The Globe & Mail
"Jeffrey Lent is an honest writer, one brave enough to offer up a man's soul stripped of anything that might protect it...a passionate novelist whose graceful peculiarity only makes his work all the richer."
-The Globe & Mail
Grove's description of After You've Gone
The brave portrayal of a man finding hope in the midst of life-changing tragedy, After You’ve Gone has been hailed as “truly an emotional journey” (Star-Tribune, Minneapolis). Now in paperback, it is a moving, sublime love story set in the cataclysmic decades around the turn of the twentieth century and spanning Nova Scotia, New York, and Amsterdam.
Henry Dorn has spent years building a family, but it only takes a single afternoon for it to fall apart. Abruptly widowed of Olivia, 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. At first Henry does not know what to make of Lydia, but before long the two have fallen into an affair of a depth and significance for which neither was prepared. And just as quickly as he was robbed of his wife, Henry is faced with the possibility of new beginnings. But the memory of the woman he fell for in the first blush of youth, 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 in After You’ve Gone he has delivered a masterpiece: a gorgeous tale that encompasses several pivotal decades in American life and beautifully charts the sweep of a life, the grim reach of a war, and the discovery—and loss—of life-defining love.
The brave portrayal of a man finding hope in the midst of life-changing tragedy, After You’ve Gone has been hailed as “truly an emotional journey” (Star-Tribune, Minneapolis). Now in paperback, it is a moving, sublime love story set in the cataclysmic decades around the turn of the twentieth century and spanning Nova Scotia, New York, and Amsterdam.
Henry Dorn has spent years building a family, but it only takes a single afternoon for it to fall apart. Abruptly widowed of Olivia, 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. At first Henry does not know what to make of Lydia, but before long the two have fallen into an affair of a depth and significance for which neither was prepared. And just as quickly as he was robbed of his wife, Henry is faced with the possibility of new beginnings. But the memory of the woman he fell for in the first blush of youth, 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 in After You’ve Gone he has delivered a masterpiece: a gorgeous tale that encompasses several pivotal decades in American life and beautifully charts the sweep of a life, the grim reach of a war, and the discovery—and loss—of life-defining love.
From the Bloomsbury Spring 2015 catalog:
From the author of the bestseller In the Fall, an epic historical novel that fearlessly addresses the largest questions of love, justice, and how to live.
At the close of the Civil War, weary veteran Malcolm Hopeton returns to his home in western New York State to find his wife and hired man missing and his farm in disrepair. A double murder ensues, the repercussions of which ripple through a community with spiritual roots in the Second Great Awakening. Hopeton has gone from the horrors of war to those far worse, and arrayed around him are a host of other people struggling to make sense of his crime. Among them is Enoch Stone, the lawyer for the community, whose spiritual dedication is subverted by his lust for power; August Swarthout, whose wife has left earthly time and whose eye is set on eternity; and a boy who must straddle two worlds as he finds his own truth and strength. Always there is love and the memory of love that is as haunting as the American pastoral Eden that Lent has so exquisitely rendered in this unforgettable novel.
A Slant of Light is a novel of earthly pleasure and deep love, of loss and war, of prophets and followers, of theft and revenge, in an American moment where a seemingly golden age has been shattered. This is Jeffrey Lent on his home ground and at the height of his powers.
•
From the author of the bestseller In the Fall, an epic historical novel that fearlessly addresses the largest questions of love, justice, and how to live.
At the close of the Civil War, weary veteran Malcolm Hopeton returns to his home in western New York State to find his wife and hired man missing and his farm in disrepair. A double murder ensues, the repercussions of which ripple through a community with spiritual roots in the Second Great Awakening. Hopeton has gone from the horrors of war to those far worse, and arrayed around him are a host of other people struggling to make sense of his crime. Among them is Enoch Stone, the lawyer for the community, whose spiritual dedication is subverted by his lust for power; August Swarthout, whose wife has left earthly time and whose eye is set on eternity; and a boy who must straddle two worlds as he finds his own truth and strength. Always there is love and the memory of love that is as haunting as the American pastoral Eden that Lent has so exquisitely rendered in this unforgettable novel.
A Slant of Light is a novel of earthly pleasure and deep love, of loss and war, of prophets and followers, of theft and revenge, in an American moment where a seemingly golden age has been shattered. This is Jeffrey Lent on his home ground and at the height of his powers.
•
Here's how Grove Atlantic describes the novel on their jacket copy:
In the Fall is an extraordinary epic of three generations of an American family, the dark secrets that blister at its core, and the transcendent bonds between men and women that fuel their lives over the course of six decades.
In the twilight of the Civil War, a Union soldier named Norman Pelham, battle-wounded and near death, is found by Leah, a slave running from a different hell. After Leah nurses him back to health, Norman brings her to his family homestead in Vermont as his wife, and there they begin a family that will be shaped by their passionate devotion to each other and the consequences of their union. As her children approach adulthood, Leah is compelled to return to the South to confront the demons from which she fled many years before. Her journey will yield devastation for the entire family, transforming Norman and their two daughters forever and causing their son to turn his back on his family in favor of the anonymous, gas-lit world of bootlegging and nightclubs. Not until the next generation will the family’s secrets come to light, when their grandson is driven to retrace his family’s history and disentangle his complicated inheritance. What is revealed through this cycle of migration and return is the inescapable grip of bloodlines in a world where the cost of confronting the past is as severe as the cost of fleeing from it.
Spanning the postCivil War era to the edge of the Great Depression,In the Fall is a richly layered rendering of a rapidly evolving America from life on the farm, through the final years of Prohibition and bootlegging, to the advent of modern times. In sentences that roll with a grave, brooding beauty, Jeffrey Lent illumines the ineluctable connections that exist between black and white, North and South, past and present, as well as the violent collisions they give rise to. In the Fall is a fierce and utterly gripping vision of an American landscape and history, and an unforgettable portrait of an American family.
In the Fall is an extraordinary epic of three generations of an American family, the dark secrets that blister at its core, and the transcendent bonds between men and women that fuel their lives over the course of six decades.
In the twilight of the Civil War, a Union soldier named Norman Pelham, battle-wounded and near death, is found by Leah, a slave running from a different hell. After Leah nurses him back to health, Norman brings her to his family homestead in Vermont as his wife, and there they begin a family that will be shaped by their passionate devotion to each other and the consequences of their union. As her children approach adulthood, Leah is compelled to return to the South to confront the demons from which she fled many years before. Her journey will yield devastation for the entire family, transforming Norman and their two daughters forever and causing their son to turn his back on his family in favor of the anonymous, gas-lit world of bootlegging and nightclubs. Not until the next generation will the family’s secrets come to light, when their grandson is driven to retrace his family’s history and disentangle his complicated inheritance. What is revealed through this cycle of migration and return is the inescapable grip of bloodlines in a world where the cost of confronting the past is as severe as the cost of fleeing from it.
Spanning the postCivil War era to the edge of the Great Depression,In the Fall is a richly layered rendering of a rapidly evolving America from life on the farm, through the final years of Prohibition and bootlegging, to the advent of modern times. In sentences that roll with a grave, brooding beauty, Jeffrey Lent illumines the ineluctable connections that exist between black and white, North and South, past and present, as well as the violent collisions they give rise to. In the Fall is a fierce and utterly gripping vision of an American landscape and history, and an unforgettable portrait of an American family.
