Standalone Novels In Publication Order
- In the Fall (2000)
- Lost Nation (2002)
- A Peculiar Grace (2007)
- After You’ve Gone (2008)
- A Slant of Light (2015)
- Before We Sleep (2017)
Standalone Novels Book Covers
Jeffrey Lent Books Overview
In the Fall
‘To say that this is an astonishing piece of work for a first time novelists underrates it. This is an astonishing piece of work period. No part of Lent’s narrative is superficial. Loamy and visceral, Lent’s writing is deeply introspective, intelligent, and beautifully descriptive.’ BooklistIn the Fall is an extraordinary epic of three generations of an American family, the dark secrets that blister at its core, and the forbidden, transcendent love affairs that fuel the characters over the course of six decades. In the twilight of the Civil War, Union soldier Norman Pelham meets a runaway slave named Leah and returns with her to his family homestead in Vermont, launching the story of a bold, inter racial union and its consequences. This passionate couple and their descendants will grapple with the ongoing devastations of the war, racism and a haunting family legacy that lies dormant until a grandson is driven to discover the secret of his ancestors. Spanning post Civil War America to the edge of the Depression, In the Fall is an incredible rendering of a rapidly evolving America from life on a farm, through the final years of Prohibition and bootlegging in the resort towns of New Hampshire, to the advent of modern times. Jeffrey Lent’s novel is a fierce and utterly compelling vision of an American landscape and history and an unforgettable portrait of an American family.
Lost Nation
Jeffrey Lent’s first novel, In the Fall, was a national best seller and was celebrated as one of the best books of 2000. Hailed as ‘majestic…
epic…
vital’ by The New York Times Book Review and compared to the works of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy by Newsweek, the debut landed its author squarely in the company of the best American novelists of the day. Lost Nation resoundingly confirms Jeffrey Lent’s place in that pantheon. Set in the early nineteenth century, Lost Nation opens with a man known only as Blood guiding an oxcart of rum toward the wild country high in 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 Indian Stream triggers an escalating series of clashes that serve to sever the master servant bond between them and presents both a second chance at life. But as the conflicts within the community spill over and attract the attention of outside authorities, Blood becomes a target for those seeking easy blame for the troubles. As plots unravel and violence escalates, two young men of uncertain identity appear, and Blood is forced to confront dread 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 gives us the relentless beat of hope and, finally, the redeeming capacity of love.
A Peculiar Grace
Jeffrey Lent’s previous novels have earned him comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, Pat Conroy, and William Faulkner, and his book In the Fall was hailed as one of the best of the year by the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times. In A Peculiar Grace, Lent has delivered a book that takes his oeuvre in a new direction, a brilliant portrait of love, destruction, and rebirth in modern day Vermont. Hewitt Pearce is a forty three year old blacksmith who 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, shows up in his backwoods one morning fleeing her demons, Hewitt’s previously hermetic existence is suddenly challenged more so when he learns that Emily, the love of his life whom he’d lost twenty years before, has been unexpectedly widowed. As he gradually uncovers the secrets of Jessica’s past, and tries to win Emily’s trust again, Hewitt must confront his own dark history and his family’s, and rediscover how much he’s craved human connection. The more he reflects on the heartbreaking losses that nearly destroyed both him and his father, however, the more Hewitt realizes that his art may offer a deliverance that no love or faith can. Set in the art scene of postwar New York, a commune in the early seventies, and contemporary small town New England, A Peculiar Grace recalls Kent Haruf and Wallace Stegner. It’s a remarkable achievement by one of our finest authors and an insightful portrait of family secrets, with an unforgettable cast of characters who have learned to survive by giving shape to their losses.
After You’ve Gone
In After You ve Gone, a historical novel set in Nova Scotia, New York, and Amsterdam, Jeffrey Lent beautifully charts the sweep of a life and the discovery and loss of life defining love. Henry Dorn has spent years building a family, but it only takes a single afternoon for it to fall apart. The woman with whom he fell in love in the first blush of youth, who has been his perfect mate through a lively young marriage ripened by the raising of three children, has been lost. The car wreck that killed her also took their son Robert, a veteran of the Great War whose bitterness and addiction to morphine had slowly been driving him and Henry apart. Restless, broken, questing but unsure for what, Henry buys a steamer ticket for Amsterdam, planning to research his family history and start life anew. But nothing could have prepared him for the young 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, they have fallen into an affair of a depth and significance for which neither was prepared. And just as quickly as he was robbed of Olivia, Henry is faced with the gift of new possibilities and the need to reconcile them with those already lost. From a hardscrabble Nova Scotia fishing town, to a women’s college in New York, to a 1920s Europe alive with the unbuttoning of sexuality but scarred by war, After You ve Gone is a gorgeous tale spanning several pivotal decades in American life, and an unforgettable portrait of one man and the extraordinary women he loved.
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