The Salt Point — Paul Russell

From the award-winning author of The Coming Storm comes the brilliantly conceived and precisely rendered novel The Salt Point, a compelling novel of four people and their intermingled and unwinding desires.

Anatole loves Leigh ("Our Boy of the Mall"), a great adolescent beauty. Leigh is sleeping with Lydia, Anatole's best friend, who's fighting turning thirty. Chris, once the stunning object of Anatole's desire, is an unscrupulous friend to all and known to none.

Set in a Poughkeepsie mall--the Main Street to a new generation--The Salt Point follows Anatole, Leigh, Chris, and Lydia as they achieve their oddly triumphant lives redolent with loss and hope, humor and sadness, union and alienation. As promises are diminished and futures are abandoned, all four hurtle toward that place in which the nature of things is transmuted: a place not unlike the salt point, that unfixed location in the Hudson River where fresh water turns salty.