After You've Gone. Jeffrey Lent

       Praise for After You’ve Gone:

      “After You’ve Gone is a lyrical, honest, and valuable novel, one that attends to the quiet life of a prudent, respectable, and most ordinary man.”

      —John Dufresne, The Boston Globe

      “Truly beautiful ... The redemptive power of love has filled many a bookshelf. What sets After You’ve Gone apart is the risks it takes.”

      —The Christian Science Monitor

      “Beautifully restrained ... the novel won me with its craft and piercing insight, and the accumulating hope for what Pearce and Dorn might come to mean to each other.”

      —The Plain Dealer

      “Wonderful ... Henry’s story and the delicate, thoughtful way Lent presents it encourages us to examine our relationships, our assumptions about those we know best, and our tendency to resist the idea of a second, third or fourth act that is just as fulfilling as the first and most familiar one.”

      —Providence Journal

      “Jeffrey Lent ... is a warrior of a writer, wrestling with themes like history and love.... His writing ... towers over most anything else in contemporary American literature.”

      —The Chronicle Herald (Canada)

      “All the wonders of the heart and mind are in [this] novel. With unequalled skill and sensitivity, Jeffrey Lent offers us a profound understanding of the how and why we get through our good days and our bad days.”

      —Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World

      “[A] finely crafted tale of the early 1920s ... Both physically and intellectually, Henry Dorn travels great distances. As an author, so does Jeffrey Lent.”

      —Times Argus (Vermont)

      “I had a curious and fascinating experience with Jeffrey Lent’s After You’ve Gone. I read it three months ago and then let it slip in and out of my consciousness without beckoning it. Like all good novels, After You’ve Gone will become part of your life. The triumph is the quality of Lent’s prose.”

      —Jim Harrison

      “Lent ... writes elegant, gorgeous prose... . It is a pleasure to surrender to the beauty of the storytelling, to succumb to the force of Lent’s elegiac prose and the lingering effects of this haunting novel.”

      —BookPage

      “Intricate and rewarding ... A closeup view of the loss of innocence of a person and a world ... [a] vivid depiction of the era. It’s a nice contrast to the aimless youngsters often associated with the lost generation canon.”

      —Publishers Weekly

      “More strong, thoughtful fiction from Lent about family ties and the hold of the past on protagonists pondering their direction into the future ... the novel’s prose is ... gorgeous, its insights ... mature.”

      —Kirkus Reviews

       Praise for Other Books by Jeffrey Lent:

      “Stately and considered ... majestic ... epic ... vital ... a necessary piece in a uniquely American mosaic.”

      —The New York Times Book Review on In the Fall

      “Gripping, well-structured... . [with] precision timing and direct dialogue ... This is a compelling, at times chilling, achievement.”

      —People Magazine on Lost Nation

      “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 on In the Fall

      “A truly American novel ... The sensitivity in Lent’s vivid descriptions are not only historically accurate but sensually authentic... . Like any long journey, traveling through the pages of this book one feels as though one has truly traveled: through time and through space, arriving, finally again, at home.”

      —The San Diego Union-Tribune on In the Fall

      “There is one story that never grows tiresome, no matter how often told—and it goes like this: There are parts of a man that will stop working if left too long un-tended... . [Lent’s] tenderly tough third novel ... keeps us invested by calling upon the very resource its characters are trying to find within themselves—the hope that there are circumstances in which broken people can begin again.”

      —The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on A Peculiar Grace

      “Stunning ... Visceral ... Lost Nation is worth getting, well, lost in. It is rugged, carefully plotted, and thoughtfully constructed, offering a glimpse of a place and time most contemporary novelists simply can’t take us to ... A powerful and potentially timeless book.”

      —The Baltimore Sun

      “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. This remarkable tragedy sets the bar pretentiously high, but then somehow surpasses it.... Lent renders his story in a spectacular fury of language that cracks and flashes with desperate insight into the nature of remorse and redemption.”

      —The Christian Science Monitor

      “Wonderful dialogue and descriptions ... Lent writes muscular prose and builds complex characters who move through his plot in ways that deftly demonstrate their strengths and weaknesses.”

      —The Washington Post on Lost Nation

      “Lent has forged a many-faceted plot, vital characters, convincing psychology, and finely articulated spiritual musings.... Echoing the rhapsodic specificity and gravitas of Steinbeck and Kent Haruf, Lent has constructed a resolute tale of paradise lost and found.”

      —Booklist (starred review) on A Peculiar Grace

      “There are passages that are written so beautifully that they will take your breath away.... [Lent’s] dialogue is a model of eloquent economy, with an occasional dose of spoken music.”

      —USA Today on In the Fall

      “A powerfully written novel.... that explores a human condition as twisted and hidden as the tangled Northern wilderness.... Lent builds into a carefully and seamlessly woven plot headed toward a redemptive conclusion.”

      —The Boston Globe on Lost Nation

      “Lent masterfully creates a story that ... takes on the slow and measured rhythms of a small-town New England summer.... A Peculiar Grace is a sincere, honest telling of a man’s struggle to mature and embrace a life preserver after years of failing to find peace.”

      —Rocky Mountain News

      “Abounding with wonderful characters, surprising events, genuine suspense, a star-crossed love, and a great sweep of geography, story, and history, A Peculiar Grace is the best book to date by one of the two or three most gifted American novelists since William Faulkner.”

      —Howard Frank Mosher on A Peculiar Grace

      “[A Peculiar Grace] may appeal to fans of Howard Norman or Wallace Stegner.”

      —Library Journal

      “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.”