JUST EAST OF NOWHERE

In Lehigh’s debut coming-of-age novel, a young man in small-town Maine grapples with his troubling temper and the painful secret of his origins.

Dan Winters is fresh out of juvenile prison after nine years,and his mother has died while he was inside. She was a strict, God-fearing woman who was often marginalized by the people of Eastport for being one of the town’s “holy rollers.” Dan had a complicated relationship with his late mother and has never known his father. He dreams of a larger, freer life, but he’s tormented by a rage he can’t understand; his brutalization of his classmate Griff Kimball was what originally landed him in juvenile prison. As Dan continuously explores the fraught truth of his family history, a layered story of deception, revelation, and all resultant grief takes shape; for example, he learns from news clippings that his father, ex–U.S. Navy officer Lester Fortin, was convicted of sexually assaulting his mother when she was 17. Interspersed are scenes of troubled relationships and the delusions of adolescence, crafting a rich narrative landscape of Downeast Maine. Lehigh’s fast-paced novel presents an unsettling but earnest portrait of toxic masculinity and the affinities that form between isolated individuals in the midst of terrible violence. Suffused with images of “brick homes sat like Monopoly houses on narrow lots,” and the “sandy, silvered edge” of northern waters, the novel is precise in its construction of mood and place. The work can sometimes lack clarity and fluidity due to its ambitious timeline, set in the past and nearer present. Nonetheless, this novel presents a vivid image of people left behind.

An atmospheric and often raw drama.