The story begins with an interracial marriage between a Vermont soldier and a runaway slave girl. Nineteen-year-old Norman Pelham is wounded and dying in the woods of Virginia near the end of the war when 16-year-old Leah finds and saves him. She has fled Sweetboro, N.C., after killing her owner's sonAher own half brotherAwhen he tried to rape her. Norman and Leah know better than to allow their initial attraction to flower into love, but they cannot ignore their passion, and they marry on the road to Vermont. In brisk, confident detail, Lent recreates many historical scenesAsoldiers returning wearily home, cider-pressing time in Vermont, the ins and outs of bootlegging and whiskey-running in the resort mountains of New Hampshire in the '20s. The male charactersANorman, his son and youngest child, Jamie, and Jamie's son, FosterAprovide the narrative thread for the novel; but it is Leah whose story thematically unites the lives of husband, son, and grandson.

Hailed by critics as one of the most astonishing first novels in recent memory, In the Fall is that rare thing: a truly moving and brilliantly written American family epic. In prose that ranges from searingly earthy to wondrously lyrical, Jeffrey Lent conjures the history of three generations born of passion and pursued by the past.

At the close of the Civil War, Norman Pelham, son of a Vermont farmer is found wounded in the woods by Leah, an escaped slave running for her life. The two become lovers as Leah nurses Norman back to health and journey north together as man and wife. Only after they have established their own family and uneasy but respect- ful ties to the community does Leah's past reappear, and she is com- pelled to travel south. She returns with a secret that rends what the lovers have wrought and confounds those around her. Her son, Jamie, escapes rural Vermont and, passing for white, enters the netherworld of small-time bootlegging and the outwardly glam- orous Northern resorts. But Jamie can no more escape the past than could his mother. It is up to his son, Foster, to rediscover the path that led from a decrepit Southern plantation to a bucolic Vermont homestead and back, a path littered with the sorrows of slavery and obstructed by the unanswered challenges of race.