A Peculiar Grace
A Novel
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3.8 • 13 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed author’s “transcendent story about the healing power of love and art” set in the New England woods—“magisterial and . . . beautifully written” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Hewitt Pearce lives alone in his Vermont family home, producing custom ironwork and safeguarding a small collection of art his late father left behind. When Jessica, a troubled young vagabond, washes up in his backwoods one morning, Hewitt’s hermetic existence is challenged. As he gradually uncovers Jessica’s secrets and reestablishes contact with Emily, a woman he thought he had lost twenty years before, Hewitt must confront his own dark history and rediscover how much he craves human connection.
Rendered in prose that is “lustrous—rich in supple dialogue and finely patterned imagery,” A Peculiar Grace is a remarkable achievement by one of our finest authors, an insightful portrait of family secrets, and a rich tapestry filled with characters who have learned to survive by giving shape to their losses (Booklist).
“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
“Jeffrey Lent has quietly created some of the finest novels of our new century.” —Ron Rash
“Jeffrey Lent builds characters and their world like a painter layering his canvas, telling his story but substantiating it with color and light.” —Tim Pears
“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
Family-fracturing secrets are at the heart of Lent's luminous third novel, a transcendent story about the healing power of love and art. Two decades after an intense romance curdles, hermetic Hewitt Pearce is living in his family's rural Vermont home, firing up his tractor for the occasional two-mile trip to the village, sometimes hiding in his hay barn, and producing prized custom ironwork when the spirit moves him. Upheaval arrives in the form of Jessica, a psychologically troubled waif with mysterious connections to Hewitt's late artist father. Then Hewitt learns that Emily, the girl he loved years earlier and whose life he has tracked from afar, is now a widow. Evocative flashbacks reveal his family's turbulent history, including Hewitt's days of sex, drugs, and rock and roll on a commune and his dark period of "death-by-whisky drinking" after breaking up with Emily. This sympathetic depiction of a decent man wrestling with his demons while deciding whether to revive an old love or open himself to a new lover is less visceral than Lent's astonishing debut, In the Fall, and less gritty than his second novel, Lost Nation, but it's no less magisterial and every bit as beautifully written.
