Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories

RUIN

Leigh Seippel

A Novel of Flyfishing in Bankruptcy

This vivid story opens with every couple's nightmare-the disappearance of their comfortable known world. 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 . . . .
Frank is another dreamer whose life is suddenly burned to the ground. More a disillusioned literature Ph.D. than an experienced financier, he 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 at a desolate non-working Hudson Valley farm. Frank starts an artisanal brewery with a charismatic new eccentric friend. And, central to the heart of the story, he takes up fly fishing. A local doctor, perceiving Frank's depression, prescribes that he gain some confidence through self-taught fishing.

Frank's perceptions on the water are fresh and acute, sometimes colored by his memory of the words of famous writers, now painfully ironic in his life's new context. - The novel weaves together fly fishing and life experiences that ultimately turn shockingly deadly.

And throughout, there is Francy's story. Now in exile, she re-approaches painting with new and darkly complex emotional energy. Painting in reclusive concentration, she cuts Frank off, tacitly becoming her own woman. Her work's enigmatic intensity attracts a wealthy neighbor who offers Francy a show in his Manhattan gallery and that attracts a great deal of trouble indeed.

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.
Available products
Book

Published 2022-09-27 by City Point Press

Comments

Leigh Seippel's tale of wreckage, fishing, and renewal reads like a song, drawing us across the hazy Rubicon that divides every lost man's heart.

Absorbing and astonishing. Leigh Seippel knows the dynamics of streams, sentences, and the human soul. RUIN is a novel to be savored.

A thoroughly engrossing novel about a young couple's struggle to come back from financial catastrophe. Having fled their urban life, they begin to build a new life together in a rural setting, only to have it fall apart all over again in ways that could never be predicted.

This vivid story opens with every couple's nightmare - the disappearance of their comfortable known world ... The novel weaves together fly fishing and life experiences that ultimately turn shockingly deadly.