Firth Haring Fabend

LAND SO FAIR, Firth Haring Fabend's sixth novel, a family saga, opens in 1737 on a Bergen County, NJ, farm, where the family's land, "sought, bought, cleared, planted, harvested, bequeathed, fought over, challenged, confiscated, and laced with blood and bones," is threatened anew each generation. The family is the author's own family--she is the eleventh generation of it--and the three stong-minded women in this gripping story are her own grandmothers. Constant threats to their land, feared and fearful slave uprisings, and the inevitability of impending Revolution define their daily lives, creating conflicts for them--and an exciting read for the booklover.

 

As the struggle for independence from England versus loyalty to the Crown heats up, war erupts, dividing once-convivial families into opposite camps and producing ever-more desperate challenges to daily life. These divisions end in a fierce local "civil war" between Loyalists and Patriots that throws the looting and plundering, bloody massacres, and battles and treason of the Revolution into horrifying relief. Readers of LAND SO FAIR will no doubt recognize that it's their fair land, too, and their history, too, that Fabend describes.

 

Fabend's previous five novels are The Best of Intentions, Three Women, A Perfect Stranger, The Woman Who Went Away, and Greek Revival. With LAND SO FAIR, she returns to the novel after twenty-five years of writing and publishing history. Combining her skills in plot construction and suspense with a well-honed insistence on historical veracity, she creates in LAND SO FAIR a hair-raising saga of colonial life.

 

Advance Praise for LAND SO FAIR:

 

"Fabend's evocative prose recreates a vivid New World."

 

"A poignant and gripping story, richly researched."

 

"Grounded in an important and overlooked part of history. Wonderfully researched!"

 

"A convincing and imaginative reconstruction that balances historical details with human qualities that transcend a specific era."