The Notebook of Lost Things
A spare, elegant story about lives in a small town where the distant past reappears to explain the truth about an unlikely romantic affection.
"A wonderful novel--idiosyncratic, fascinating, involving, powerful." Frederick Bush
From the first page:
At the farm on Eastern Road, where Helene lived with William Swick, October was the month for killing chickens. Chicken death was the right activity for an October afternoon when the last of the insects buzzed in the high grass and the air was filled with leaf dust and drifting seeds. The afternoon sun slanted down over the hillside and even though it was warm, it was a distant, equivocal warmth because in the rot and sludge at the surface of the earth there was a trickle of something cold that overnight would get even more sluggish as it slipped into the medial stage between liquid and ice.