New York, NY: Grove (2007)

Fine in dust jacket.

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 heart-breaking 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.

New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press (2002)

Fine in dust jacket.

Set in the early nineteenth century, Lost Nation is about a man known only as Blood. A man of learning and wisdom with a secret past that has scorched his soul, Blood remakes 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 — a land where the luckless or outlawed have made a fresh start — triggers an escalating series of clashes that will not only sever the master-servant bond between Blood and Sally, but also force Blood to confront his own dreaded past and offer Sally a final escape. In prose both lucid and seductive, the story carries us deeply into human and natural conditions of extreme desolation and harrowing hardship, and at the same time gives us the relentless beat of hope and, finally, the redeeming strength of love.

New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press (2000)

Fine in dust jacket.

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 saga. In the twilight of the Civil War, Leah, an escaped slave, discovers Norman Pelham, a wounded Union soldier who lies dying on 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 have created. Her son Jamie, passing for white, escapes his legacy and enters a world of petty boot-legging, 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.