The Wreckage of Eden

"[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." —NPR"Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth . . . to create something entirely new—an American fable of ideas." —Shelf Awareness"The Wreckage of Eden is a huge and dark fresco of an army chaplain's journey through very difficult and troubling periods of American history (normally denied us in school), and all the while this fine angle of approach is like a slow cinematic zoom and track onto an elusive Emily Dickinson ensconced in her Amherst." —The Brothers Quay, award-winning film directorsWhen U.S. Army chaplain Robert Winter first meets Emily Dickinson, he is...