Galen's Legacy

Imprisonment for a crime you didn't commit gives you time to think. In his forties, Galen Melville, an openly gay man, emerges from prison in the mid-1990s, exonerated from a crime he did not commit. Now free, Galen returns to the idyllic landscape of this Oregon hometown whose center is the eccentric Vondel hotel run by his quirky Dutch family. Suddenly he discovers that perhaps the ghost of his beloved uncle is afoot in the bequeathed abandoned mansion across the street and perceives mysterious signs of guidance in  his search for right relationships with his young son and grown daughter. In his quest, he also hooks up with two muscular and beautiful men, Anton, the landscaper, and Brent, the physical therapist, one older and one younger. He also fights to establish his uncle's mansion as refuge for gay and lesbian people. This sensually evoked, affirmative, often comic, sometimes sexually explicit novel follows Galen through a slowly evolving pastoral world, made vivid in riveting prose, where his mother finds a renewed sense of her poetic vocation, his father finds sobriety, and his older lover discovers his roots and liberation from the closet.