My Life and Adventures — Castle Freeman

Fleeing the wreckage of a murky diplomatic job in a Chaotic Latin country, Mark Noon finds himself down-and-out and holed up in a hotel in Mexico. As a last resort, he claims an odd bequest from a long-deceased family friend named Hugo Usher, and comes north to move into a dilapidated hill farmhouse in rural Vermont.

There, Noon begins to rebuild the house and the fragments of his life. He comes to know the complex histories of the memorable residents of Bible Hill, including Orlando Applegate, the lawyer and town father who becomes Mark's mentor in his new life -- and Orlando's troubled daughter, Amanda, who captures his heart and begins to share her life with him.

Mark also discovers the journal of the farm's previous tenant, a bachelor named Claude Littlejohn whose cryptic diary of weather conditions he finds hidden in a trunk in the attic. As Mark pieces together the secret behind Littlejohn's lonely hardscrabble life, he embraces his new community, and learns to thrive there.

My Life and Adventures sets the haunted and transcendental New England of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson side-by-side with the dope and llama farmers, survivalists, and leaf-peepers of our day. The result is a delightful, unusual novel of one man's estrangement and return.