Lost Nation
A Novel
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
The acclaimed author’s “mesmerizing tale” of a young man and woman who struggle to survive in the remote, disputed territory of 19th-century New Hampshire (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
With an oxcart full of rum, a man known as Blood travels through the wild country of New England toward an ungoverned territory called the Indian Stream—a land where the luckless or outlawed can make 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. Intending to establish himself as a prosperous trader, he brings with him Sally, a sixteen-year-old girl he won from her mother in a game of cards.
Blood and Sally’s arrival in the Indian Stream triggers an escalating series of clashes that soon destroy the master/servant bond between them, offering both a second chance with life. But as the conflicts within the community attract the attention of outside authorities, Blood becomes a target for those in need of a scapegoat, forcing him to confront dreaded apparitions from his past, while Sally is offered a final escape.
“In intensely charged prose very reminiscent of Faulkner’s,” Lost Nation delves beneath the bright, promising veneer of early-nineteenth-century New England to reveal a startling, violent parable of individualism and nationhood (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
“A rousing tale that will surely please the readers of his first, bestselling novel, In the Fall.” —Publishers Weekly
“Jeffrey Lent has quietly created some of the finest novels of our new century.” —Ron Rash
“Sentence by sentence rural New England comes alive, and Lent’s language draws you in like a clear stream in summer.” —Tim Gautreaux
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While the classic western naturally concentrates on the West, there were pockets in the East that were as wild as Dodge City, and Lent has found one in his second novel. Northern New Hampshire in 1838 was a long way from Nathaniel Hawthorne's civilized Boston. The ominously self-named Mr. Blood trails a mysterious past into the area, bringing "twin hogsheads of black Barbados rum," some casks of gunpowder and a 16-year-old whore named Sally whom he purchased in Portland, Maine. When Blood opens his tavern, he warns Sally to be wary of the clientele, which is good advice. Trappers, outlaws and Indians wreak havoc on each other in the cold wilderness. When the high sheriff of Coos County decides to bring a little law and order to the region, he and his men are ambushed. While Blood tries to mediate a truce, his past catches up with him in the person of two boys who have come from down south, Fletcher and Cooper. Unbeknownst to Blood, these are his sons. Fletcher falls for Sally, and when Blood is arrested by a Canadian force for complicity in the murder of a French-Canadian trader, Sally goes to Fletcher for help. Lent's novel strains under the stylistic influence of Cormac McCarthy, making its way in long sentences with a paucity of commas and a surfeit of gore: "Crane had been bound hand and foot, his arms tight to his sides, and buried up to his neck in a small beaver bog that was boiling with mosquitoes and deerflies. Very precisely his eyelids had been cut away." However, it tells a rousing tale that will surely please the readers of his first, bestselling novel, In the Fall.
