Jeffrey Lent lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter. In the Fall is his first novel.

In the twilight of the civil War, a Union soldier named Norman Pelham, battle-wounded and near death, is found by Leah, a slave running from a different hell. After Leah nurses him back to health, Norman brings her to his family homestead in Vermont as his wife, and there they begin a family that will be shaped by their passionate devotion to each other and the consequences of their union. As her children approach adulthood, Leah is compelled to return to the South to confront the demons from which she fled many years before. Her journey will yield devastation for the entire family, transforming Norman and their two daughters forever and causing their son to turn his back on his family in favor of the anonymous, gas-lit world of bootlegging and nightclubs. Not until the next generation will the family's secrets come to light, when their grandson is driven to retrace his family's history and disentangle his complicated inheritance. What is revealed through this cycle of migration and return is the inescapable grip of bloodlines in a world where the cost of confronting the past is severs as the cost of fleeing from it.