Worlds collide over the course of one fevered summer where the sale of a Sullivan County property is at stake. Beth Barkman, recovering from an abortion she hasn’t mentioned to her husband, rents a cabin upstate for herself and young son. There she forms an essential friendship with her eccentric landlord, Ira Lecher. Meanwhile, Ira’s sometimes lover, real estate agent Noreen Murphy, becomes drawn into Murmur Lake and its dark past. Noreen’s daughter, Paige, a local waitress, plots her escape from opioids and an abusive boyfriend, while in the neighboring town a conflicted Hasidic son grapples with his own anvil of grief. Unfolding against the backdrop of the former Borscht Belt, Lech probes the biblical question of Lech, Lecha —How do we go forth in life? How do we integrate the haunt of the past into the present? — in a contemporary story of love and loss, what we carry and leave behind, and how to forge a path through all that defines us, with the hope of better understanding one another in the process.

Fiction
Lech
- From the Publisher
September 1, 2021
Discussion Questions

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