After almost fifteen years, Hebert has returned to this rich literary landscape for a new novel of the changing economic and social character of New England. Hebert's previous Darby book, Live Free or Die, recounted the ill-fated love between Freddie Elman, son of the town trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, child of Upper Darby gentility. At its conclusion, Lilith died giving birth to their son. As Spoonwood opens, Freddie, consumed by grief and anger and struggling with alcoholi...

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American townAfter almost fifteen years, Hebert has returned to this rich literary landscape for a new novel of the changing economic and social character of New England. Hebert's previous Darby book, Live Free or Die, recounted the ill-fated love between Freddie Elman, son of the town trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, child of Upper Darby gentility. At its conclusion, Lilith died giving birth to their son. As Spoonwoo...

His life had come to this: save a few deer from the jaws of dogs. He was a small man sent to perform a small task. Howard Elman is a man whose internal landscape is as disordered as his front yard, where native New Hampshire birches and maples mingle with a bullet-riddled washer, abandoned bathroom fixtures, and several junk cars. Howard, anti-hero of this first novel in Ernest Hebert's highly acclaimed Darby Chronicles, is a man who is tough and tender.Howard's battle against encr...

The struggle between the rural working class and the upper crust intensifies in this turning-point novel of the Darby Chronicles as Freddy Elman, son of the town trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, daughter of a prestigious family, embark on their ill-fated love affair.Seeing Darby through new eyes, Freddy comes to realize that "the kind of people who hunkered down among these tree-infested, rock-strewn hills" is "dying out, replaced by people with money, education, culture, people...

The second novel of the Darby Chronicles follows Ollie Jordan, a man with no education, no mentors, and a serious Freudian hang-up. A family history of poverty, stubborn pride, and a culture that runs contrary to mainstream society have robbed Ollie and his people of opportunity, even hope. They live by a culture of "succor and ascendancy." When Ollie is evicted from his shack, he breaks his drinking rules and heads out into the wilderness with his disabled son, Willow, literally chained t...

In 1746, Nathan Blake, the first frame house builder in Keene, New Hampshire, was abducted by Algonkians and held in Canada as a slave. Inspired by this dramatic slice of history, novelist Ernest Hebert has written a masterful new novel recreating those years of captivity. Set in New England and Canada during the French and Indian Wars, The Old American is driven by its complex, vividly imagined title character, Caucus-Meteor. By turns shrewd and embittered, ambitious and despairing, inspi...

The institution of town meeting, the beauty of the landscape, and the enduring qualities of the architecture all give the New England town the power to shape the identity of its inhabitants—in a good way. This premise is put on trial—and to a vote—in Whisper My Name, the third novel in Hebert's Darby Chronicles.The story unfolds as seen through the eyes of three men: the reporter Roland LaChance, the farmer Avalon Hillary, and the founder of a land trust, Raphael "Reggie"...

A major character in earlier Darby novels, Estelle takes center stage in The Passion of Estelle Jordan. Presently she is sliding into late middle age, drawn to two lovers who could not be more different: the widowed farmer Avalon Hillary and a mysterious young punk Estelle calls Trans Am in honor of the car he drives. And there's a threat, not to Estelle—she can take care of herself—but to Noreen Cook, a younger woman Estelle sees as a version of her own secret, vulnerable self. P...

Part Falstaff, part King Lear, but all American, Howard Elman was a fifty-something workingman when he burst onto the literary scene in The Dogs of March, the first novel of the Darby Chronicles. Now in this, its seventh installment, the Darby constable is an eighty-something widower who wants to do "a great thing" before he motors off into the sunset.Maybe Howard achieves this goal, but he manages it in strange, wonderful, and dangerous ways. On his quest he's aided, abet...

NOW A MAJOR FILM, LEAVE NO TRACE. Inspired by a true story, a riveting and unsettling novel about a girl and her father who live off the grid, in the shadows at the edge of civilization.Thirteen-year-old Caroline and her father live in Forest Park, an enormous nature preserve in Portland, Oregon. They inhabit an elaborate cave shelter, wash in a nearby creek, store perishables at the water's edge, use a makeshift septic system, tend a garden, even keep a li...

When an abandoned baby is left on her doorstep, the young socialite widow knows only too well the identity of the father: her deceased philanderer of a husband. But who is the mother? The case seems like child's play to Nero Wolfe, until the first dead body. While the police nurse their grudges against him, and the widow nurses Archie, the genius sleuth and his sidekick look for the hand that rocked the cradle. But nothing can pacify the killer, who's found the formula for murder—and is de...

Take a journey into darkness. Visit places where one might expect to find the dark—in a house where love was shared and lost, a milky-white pool in an Australian cave, the trenches of World War I, the deep woods. You would not be surprised to find the dark in a cheap apartment on the wrong side of town, down mean streets, under a gallows-tree, along dank passageways, trapped underground, in the near future, or among the mysteries of old New Orleans. Dunes, lakes, isolated cabins, old books...