Gary and Susan Hazen—high school sweethearts married for many years, born and bred in the Adirondack community of Lost Lake—live a simple and honest life and have instilled values in their two grown sons by example. But despite their efforts, Gary senses that his sons are starting to pull away and can’t help but feel he is at fault. His younger son, Kevin, has ambitions that extend far beyond the snowy edges of their small town. And his elder, Gary David, so fears disappointing his father that he is keeping an important part of his life secret. The Grace That Keeps This World is a story about family, community, and the shared values that underlie and sustain human relationships. And ultimately, it is a tale of profound loss, human fallibility, and the love—romantic, neighborly, or familial—that can sometimes blur our line of vision. A Book Sense pick Includes a new essay by the author and a preview chapter of his forthcoming novel, Cotton Song . “Acompelling first novel about love and rivalry in the adirondacks builds toward a shattering conclusion.” — People “Like some modern-day version of a Greek tragedy . . . a chorus of narrators . . . moves this story . . . slowly and beautifully [toward] an indelible disaster. . . . This is, after all, a story about a man forced to expand his moral imagination, and in the end it inspires the same sympathy from us.” — Washington Post Book World “A beautifully drawn, tragic novel about fathers and sons—and the bonds of community.” — Atlanta Journal Constitution Tom Bailey is the author of Crow Man , a collection of short stories, and A Short Story Writer’s Companion , and the editor of On Writing Short Stories . He lives with his wife and three children in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, where he teaches in the creative writing program at Susquehanna University. This is his first novel. Gary Hazen The dark green Jeep Cherokee with the yellow-and-gold D.E.C. police seal on its door turns off the log road, bumping the rut, and powers up into the cut's landing. It's my younger son, I expect, nineteen-year-old, blond Kevin, who promised me he'd be here by noon, home from school for the weekend to help us get in the last of this wood. But it's that new lady environmental conservation officer, Josephine Roy, always busy scouting around our North Country, who's somehow managed to find us at work out here on this tiny twenty-four-acre private parcel inside of Hamilton County's blue-lined million-acre part of the park. It's past lunch, after 1:00, and when I see who it is, who it isn't, the Stihl 034 in my hands grumbles, and I return to my work. Rocking the blade of the chain saw back, I give it the juice, slice forward, the honed sharpness singing into the wood. Chips spit past the goggles that mask my glasses. You can't be too careful. Kevin's brother, my older son, dark, curly-headed Gary David, stands behind me steadying the trunk of the tree-sized limb, but hustles around to the front at the end of my cut to ease the log's falling, helping not to let it pinch the blade. Forced to work the jobs of two men, he catches the log as it falls, before it can drop, lopped off into the snow, and turns and tosses it on top of the mounding pile sinking the springs of our rusted old, red and white, half-ton F250 Ford. He then steps quickly back around me again to steady the limb for the next cut--right where I need him, when I need him, no waiting around. And there's no time to wait. We've got wood to get in--always I can hear Kevin say, being smart, now that he's a college man, he's always being smart--there's always work to be done. Trouble is, this morning we woke to another two-inch dusting of snow, and gun season starts next Saturday. We're hot in a race against the coming North Country cold, caught between a rock and a hard place of the dual necessities of getting in this waste of good wood before the big snows begin and bagging our limit of deer to help us make it through one of these no-fooling winters again. Both Kevin and Gary David know the importance of these two needs because I brought up both my boys to know them. The way we choose to live we have no choice. We have to work when the working's good, not when we want to. If we want to be warm and eat, that is. For us deer season's not a matter of mounting a staring head or congratulating ourselves over a rack of horns. For us hunting's as crucial as surrounding every inch of spare space under our extrawide porch and eaves with carefully cut, split, and cured wood--never imagining, not even able to imagine nor capable of comprehending in the blistering chain-saw heat of summer, that we could ever in twelve straight hard winters use all we've stacked, and then and again be stumped equally as incredulous every May when we have to scrabble up the last skinny sticks and shavings of bark to heat up the freezing kitchen at 5:00 a.m. This one single and unforgiving truth, out of which the responsibility I'm speaking