A Cold Spring - Tapa dura

Deep in the Vermont mountains is a small town, rustic and isolated, with cold, clear streams and dense, green forests. It's a place that Nell Maye remembers fondly, where her grandparents lived and where she spent summer vacations as a child. A place where not much happens. But when Nell and her husband Billy decide to leave the mess of their lives in NYC for this peaceful New England town, they realize that it's not exactly as they imagined. Under the placid surface is a place simmering with tension. There's Lenny, who's been entrusted with the care of her mute grandson Jody because his father has physically abused and abandoned him. There's Eli, a widower struggling to raise his wild son, just barely under his control. There's James, the high-school geology teacher, longing for someone to change his life, unaware that all the high-school girls secretly adore him. There's the pack of high school boys, bored and always looking to score some alcohol and cigarettes. Enter Nell, the dreamy, vaguely unhappy music teacher and Billy, her manic husband, who bring their city ways and their fears of the country along with a host of further complications for everyone around them. James falls for Nell, Billy scorns the townspeople; and a high school boy, stockpiling small resentments, decides to take revenge. When the dust settles, one man is dead, two boys are banished from town, a marriage has fallen apart, and-out of the ashes-a new romance begins. A COLD SPRING is a story of the roads we see and the ones we don't, and of those moments when lives suddenly change direction.

Advance praise for A Cold Spring This superbly accomplished novel is a magical place inhabited by jeopardized children who lead adult lives, and by grownups who are goofy, moonstruck lovers, all of them ruled by cruel finalities about which their author refuses to lie. She makes it impossible to stop reading her novel or to keep from cheering her characters on. Edra Ziesk, who loves each one of them, has spun them and their dangerous, enchanted world out of language that shimmers and stings. (--Frederick Busch)

There are few thrills as sublime as seeing the familiar from a fresh angle. Edra Ziesk is a writer capable of creating that sensation over and over again. In A Cold Spring, she portrays the fabric of relationships in a small Vermont town in sentences full of breathtaking metaphors. I felt held by her story as if in a spider web both delicate and strong. (Alice Elliott Dark)

A Cold Spring is that rare thing, a novel of community-of small-town life writ large. From parent to child, husband to wife, we meet strangers and locals estranged from each other, adrift in a landscape: at risk. There's fire and ice here for all. (Nicholas Delbanco)