Ruin
by Leigh Seippel
GENRE: Fiction
PUBLICATION DATE: 09/27/2022
DESCRIPTION:
Ruin’s adventure explores the unpredictable progression of character and chance for Francy and Frank Campbell, newly destitute in their early thirties, along with their lovers and foes. And a murder investigator ...
More a disillusioned literature Ph.D. than an experienced financier, Frank had naively agreed to join his wife’s inheritance with his own personal guarantee of a college friend’s private equity partnership debt.
The business implosion and subsequent bankruptcy took all their assets. Francy, an orphaned European heiress, now finds herself homeless, still married to pleasant, witty Frank — who had failed to protect them from disaster.
The couple flees Manhattan to live on a desolate Hudson Valley farm. And, central to the heart of the story, he takes up fly fishing.
The novel weaves together fly fishing and life experiences that ultimately turn shockingly deadly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Leigh Seippel lives in the worlds of Francy and Frank. He has worked a small farm in the
Hudson Valley, complete with officious goat herd. Fly fishing has taken him across four continents.
He is a past president of The Anglers’ Club of New York, where he now heads its fishery conservation activities.
REVIEWS:
“Ruin is a dangerously psychological romantic nightmare about a young couple’s loss and redemption. When disgraced financier Frank Campbell and his also bankrupted wife Francy escape Manhattan, they bottom out at an abandoned farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. As their marriage teeters, Frank takes up fly fishing and through it and hard artisanal work begins life again — until things go deeply wrong again. Seippel unfurls this tragicomic tale in a haunting manner, deeply echoing the vulnerability of early Hemingway and the bitterness of T.S. Eliot. The journey is thrilling, its vividly evolving characters long memorable.” —Barnaby Conrad III, author of Ghost Hunting in Montana and Jacques Villeglé and the Streets of Paris
“Absorbing and astonishing. Leigh Seippel knows the dynamics of streams, sentences, and the human soul. Ruin is a novel to be savored.” —Noah Broyles, author of The House of Dust