A Slant of Light
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
Malcolm Hopeton is on trial for his life – he has committed a horrific act that reverberates through the community of the Four Corners as it emerges from the shadows of the American Civil War.
Becca Davis has been keeping house for the widowed August Swartout for four years when she receives word that her brother Harlan has been injured in a tussle with the infamous murderer. But when Harlan comes to the house to recuperate, Becca and August are surprised. Not only does Harlan forgive his attacker, but he is ready to stand at his trial and plead in his defence.
Soon, Enoch Stone, the local lawyer, comes knocking. Sensing an opportunity to advance his own position, he has taken on Hopeton's case. As the truth behind the violence comes to light and the townspeople become caught up in the events, notions of honour and integrity, theft and revenge will be sorely tested. And they will each come to realise that the world they thought they knew can never be the same again.
A Slant of Light is a powerful novel of lust and love, loss and war, prophets and followers: of the moments that shatter our lives and the ways in which they are remade.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A double murder stirs old loyalties and resentments in Lent's (In the Fall) atmospheric novel. Malcolm Hopeton, a soldier newly returned from the Civil War, finds himself betrayed by both his wife, Bethany, and Amos Wheeler, the hired man entrusted with his farm. Hopeton's explosive rage leads him to kill them both, provoking a variety of responses within his western New York community: some incensed, others sympathetic. Harlan Davis, Hopeton's teenage farmhand and the sole witness to the crime, desperately gathers information for the defense. A portrait of a community disoriented by war and grappling for meaning in Christian spiritualism, the novel conveys Malcolm's struggles as a detailed miniature of the postwar American consciousness his disaffection and self-examination, combined with a sense of betrayal from those he trusted most. Lent's vivid description of the rural landscape calls to mind a Wyeth painting, and a surprising sensuality enlivens the characters' interactions with the world and one another. The novel is slow going at times, and the characters' seeming lack of memories of the war is puzzling; even Hopeton, clearly scarred by his experience, refers to it only in passing. Yet piece by subtle piece, the story deftly casts its spell.