Bealport: A Novel of a Town - Hardcover

In the small town of Bealport, Jeffrey Lewis has rendered a sharp and fascinating "Our Town," the community captured in its rough simplicity and broody with personal secrets. In deft command of their lives' interconnectedness, Lewis roves amongst Bealport's residents, entwined and reliant as only those living in a very small town can be, an attentive and welcoming storyteller with a fine Old New England sensibility'; David Milch, creator of Deadwood; With his beautifully written Bealport, Jeffrey Lewis has masterfully woven friction between social classes, a fading industrial town in Maine, opioid addiction, sexual scandal, financial machination, and the making of a good pair of shoes into a quilt of such subtle colorations that the reader is surprised and even shocked by their force-a stunning and heartbreaking depiction of America today. Peter Davis, author of Girl of My Dreams and director of Hearts and Minds; Bealport reveals to us all the angst and joy in small town, working class America and does it in a readable, but never simplistic, style which carries us from the first page to the last. The characters are fully drawn with tremendous understanding, humor and empathy. Mostly they are poor in riches but rich in spirit. Brilliant and, above all, thoughtful and kind. Read it. I think you'll love it. Robert Ward, author of Red Baker and Four Kinds of Rain

An old shoe factory in a coastal New England town is up for sale again. When a private equity mogul with a fondness for the factory's shoes buys it he sets in motion a story with profound implications for the way we live today. For the people of Bealport depend on Norumbega. Their livelihoods, their self-respect, their interconnectedness, are all at stake. The shadow of factories fate looms over the people of town. Idiosyncratic and humane; a cast that small communities under threat produce. Bealport is a portrait of a place, at once sympathetic, mordant, unsparing, comic, tragic, and universal, and of a way of life that is passing. It is a novel of a town, and to no small degree of every town, in America and beyond.