Back East — Ellen Pall

Melanie is a songwriter in L.A. who's sick of California. She returns to New York, takes a Greenwich Village apartment, and intends to resume her career and reestablish ties with her family. Life, however, is unpredictable. A chance meeting in an elevator leads to a relationship with Lucian, a beautiful young actor whose previous and—as it turns out—continuing relationship with Martin Ivory causes confusion and pain. It's July in molten New York, and Melanie is due in Maine, at Milk Lake, where her widowed mother, a doomed arranger of other people's lives, is reluctant to preside at her son-in-law's marriage to her cook/housekeeper. But that's the mere ticking of plot. The interest of this accomplished first novel lies in the character of Melanie, a woman whose unillusioned acceptance of how we live is delivered in an ironic, sweet-sour voice only the chastened romantic heart could muster. BACK EAST is a seamless novel about the dues everyone who loves somehow must pay.