These lives--strangers, neighbors, family, friends--entwine and separate over the course of one fevered upstate summer, in a haunting and hilarious debut novel by acclaimed author Sara Lippmann. In her inimitable prose, she mercilessly explores the predatory side of human nature through conflicts of faith, trauma, desire, belonging, and longing--the particulars of Judaism and feminism, parenting and partying, small-town life and big blundering dreams, as well as the timeless question: How do we carry on?
"Lech is the ambitious debut novel of an
excellent new prose stylist."
- The Millions
"A funny, brutal, symphonic novel from a
writer with intensity and authority to spare. The world of Lech is
as vivid, as wild, and as shockingly familiar as life itself, but way more
interesting and way better told."
- Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
"Lippmann's amiable writing makes for
great company."
- Publishers Weekly
"Lech takes place over a single
summer in the Catskills, but it's far bigger than that. Sara Lippmann is finely
attuned to the cultural, political, and religious tensions that arise between
the vacationers and the locals, between the haves and the have-nots. And, wow,
those sentences! Lippmann writes like a dream."
- Joshua Henkin, author of Morningside
Heights
"For the right reader, this jigsaw puzzle
of a novel will be a pleasure."
- Kirkus Reviews
"Sara Lippmann's novel Lech is
quilted together with loose stitching, holding the sensual with the grotesque,
the intimate with the alienated, the paratactic with the full, and on and on.
It is masterfully composed."
- Seth Rogoff, author of Thin Rising Vapors
"Sara Lippmann's Lech is a
superb Jewish gothic, an expertly pitched polyvocal tale of family, loss, and
redemption. By turns funny, beautiful, lewd and heartbreaking, Lippmann
delivers a literary performance with all the timing and energy of a great
Borscht Belt comic."
- Adam O'Fallon Price, author of The Hotel Neversink