Afton

For fifty-eight-year-old Hannah Walker the Afton Marches are a source of solace and comfort. Walking beside the Afton River, through the life-rich saltmarsh gives her respite from the hospital room where her psychologically abusive husband lies dying.

Handsome and reserved, sixty-one-year-old Leslie Willoes is a landscape artist who has spent the last fifty years exploring, painting, and loving the Marches. He's seen Hannah often, has included in her in his paintings, but has never spoken to the woman he secretly calls His Lady.

Unscrupulous Manhattan developer, Rawden Darien, aims to trump Trump by acquiring the last undeveloped coastal wetland between New York and Boston and transforming it into an upscale marina, hotel, and retail complex for big spenders. Leslie is offered a large commission to paint the landscapes that will sell Darien's vision. Will he?

Two people: one seeking healing in the Marches she's finding herself in, one dreading the wetland's grim future. Pushed in different directions by their friends, their actions will determine the future of the Marches-and their own.

Hypnotically visual and vivid, Afton is Ellen LaConte's stirring debut novel.

Ellen LaConte has worked as a freelance, a magazine, book, and corporate newsletter editor and publisher. She has written on topics as diverse as the environment; ecology; economics; contemplative practice, organic gardening; and the lives of Helen and Scott Nearing, iconic New England homesteaders.

LaConte is the author most recently of the critically acclaimed Life Rules: Nature’s Blueprint for Surviving Economic and Environmental Collapse, available from New Society Publishers. Afton is her debut novel.

After more than two decades in mid-coast Maine, LaConte now lives with her partner in the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina. More information, blogs and her newsletter ＂Starting Point＂ are available at www.ellenlaconte.com.