Lake Song: A Novel in Stories

Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction
The linked stories of Lake Song, set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region, span decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the twentieth century hurtles forward. Against a backdrop of historical events--bootlegging, Klan attacks, gold smuggling, the Albany Ketchup Murders, the 1965 Northeast blackout--a generations-long mystery unwinds. In 1906 Mavis Staunch drowns in Okisee Lake days after she refuses to sell her land to a trio of brothers. The same night, one of the brothers, Angus Epps, doesn’t come home. Few suspect the two events are connected, and no one imagines the role that a ten-year-old boy, a canoe, and a pack of coyotes play in the tragedies. Spiritualists, grifters, sugar makers, arsonists, seekers, and saleswomen wind through each other’s lives and across decades to add layers of resonance to each captivating story. The mercurial lake that unites the people of Kinder Falls sustains as much as it haunts, both witness and diary.

Lesley Pratt Bannatyne is the author of the short story collection Unaccustomed to Grace as well as fiction and essays in the Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Christian Science Monitor, and many literary magazines. Her latest nonfiction book, Halloween Nation, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist. Lake Song is her seventh book.