Lantern Marsh

Mauney Bard is trapped between the red brick farmhouse his father built and the long marsh that stretches beyond the Beulah road, a boundary that feels less like geography than like fate. His father's land is prosperous, the apple-orchard well-tended, the stone fence solid and enduring. But Mauney sees only the confine of it: the endless obligations, the weight of expectations written into every furrow of the fields. Beyond the marsh lies Lockwood on the St. Lawrence, and beyond that, a world he has only imagined. Cornell writes with sharp, quiet intensity about the particular agony of a young man who can see exactly what his life will become and cannot yet see how to want something different. The marsh itself becomes the novel's beating heart, at once desolate and luminous, a place where Mauney's restlessness takes physical form. This is a novel about the first bitter knowledge that fulfillment might lie elsewhere, and the terrifying question of whether anywhere will have you.