Try to imagine not even knowing how to fall, because a hand was always there to catch you. How does someone, excluded from the only community he or she has ever known, go on living? Harvard student Jeremy Stull lives with a devout Amish family to observe their faith and their shunning of those who breach it. He befriends Beulah--a banished Amish woman--but comes no closer to undrstanding her predicament than he is to fathoming his own bitter exile. For Jeremy, community means Ironwood, a summer camp in the Vermont woods. First as a camper, then as assistant director, Jeremy has found in Ironwood's rituals a sturdy foundation for his life. But when he is blindsided by the seductive charm of Max, a fourteen-year-old boy from Manhattan, all arms and legs and attitude, Jeremy must confront both his own confusing desires and a legacy of disturbing secrets at Ironwood.--From publisher description.

The collected early novels of an American master. Now finally collected into a single volume, the Sherbrookes trilogy—Possession, Sherbrookes, and Stillness—is Nicholas Delbanco’s most celebrated achievement. Centering upon one New England clan and their estate in southwestern Vermont—a full thousand acres, including the bleak and chilly Big House, from which the volatile Sherbrookes have such trouble escaping—these books form a virtuoso portrait of the love, pride, resentment, and even madness we inherit from our families. Written in his characteristically opulent, bravura prose, Delbanco is here revealed as a Henry James for our time: a passionate cataloger of human strength and frailty. Edited and revised by the author some thirty years after its first publication, the trilogy—“made new” as the single-volume Sherbrookes—can now be rediscovered by a new generation of readers.