The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is a languorous trip to the southern parts of the U.S. Equal parts paean to the southern climate, culture, and landscape and enthralling character study, Homecoming builds a story of a family and community that resonates with honesty and serves as an astonishing debut novel for Jenny Wingfield. We begin in 1956, on the first Sunday in June, at the family farm where the Moses family is having their annual family reunion. All too soon tragedy strikes; the family is shaken to its core, and Samuel Lake, his wife Willadee, and their three children begin a summer destined to mark each of them for life.

It is Samuel’s daughter, Swan, who immediately captures the reader’s attention (and heart). Full of life, curiosity and compassion, Swan is a gorgeously captured character. She has the sort of arrow-straight insight given only to children and an awareness of those around her that leads to all sorts of adventures and nearly drags her, and her entire family, into tragedy.

That is not to say that Swan is perfect, she is blithely aware of her faults:

There were lots of things the Moseses would do without a qualm, but they plain would not lie. This didn’t necessarily hold true for their children. Swan lied daily. Took pleasure in it. She fabricated the most wondrous, the most atrocious tales, and told them for the truth. The good thing about lies was that the possibilities were limitless. You could make up a world that was just like you wanted it, and if you pretended hard enough, it would start to feel real.

But, as with everything Swan says, there is more here than a mere childish delight in story-telling. There is a sense of the worlds that people create around themselves, none more so than her father, a preacher who struggles to get his congregations to accept the world as he describes it. There is an awareness of the lies that others allow to be told, found at their darkest in Ras Ballenger, a villain worthy of the most terrifying of nightmares, a man others allow to weave a tissue of lies around his abuse. He swaggers onto the scene and menaces everyone around him, and the story itself begins to bend around the evil he brings.

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake sounds like it should be a story of someone returning to their roots, of the discovery of what was already there, of what it is to find a home once left, a past once lost to time. It is all that and more; it is a lyrical representation of the American South; it is a story of a family that runs a dry good store out of the front of the house and a late-night saloon out of the back; it is a chance to spend time with Swan Lake, a heroine that could give Tom Sawyer a run for his money at storytelling, and a debut that should guarantee Jenny Wingfield hordes of readers for years to come.

Read an extract of The Homecoming of Samuel Lake over on Bookhugger

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