Cynthia Lang

Preservation Cynthia Lang

Why leave Manhattan for a town in Maine "where no one goes and nothing ever happens"? Confused, bereft, but following a hunch, Lee Baldwin moves to Limmington Mills to revel in solitude and brood about her missing husband. Life has other plans. While never forgetting about her Charlie, Lee is pulled into the daily dramas of her imaginative, flighty landlady Dolly and Dolly's brother, a taciturn welder at Bath Iron Works. Befriended by Maxine, store proprietor (and de facto town manager), she meets a trio of boys running wild and their mother, who may or may not have heard a saint speak. Most of all, Lee benefits from Hazel's fierce grace, the elderly woman whose grip on life breathes energy into Lee's own. Evoking the lives of northern New Englanders who struggle in the shadow side of prosperity, Preservation explores the isolation-and possibilities-of a time before electronics linked us nonstop through the cloud.