The Vagabonds

Nicholas Delbanco

Oct 2007 · Sold by Grand Central Publishing

About this ebook

It doesn't matter, really, if what we inherit is money or debt, a set of cats or cutlery or a portrait of grandfather Aaron. What matters is the way we deal with what's been left behind. The Vagabonds From critically acclaimed author Nicholas Delbanco comes a novel about a family with a mysterious inheritance and a secret tie to history... Born and raised in Saratoga Springs, New York, the three Saperstone siblings have drifted apart and lead very separate lives. On Cape Cod, Joanna manages a B and B and a teenage daughter, feeling vulnerable and alone. In Ann Arbor, Claire flirts with becoming an interior decorator while coming to terms with a personal betrayal. And in Berkeley, David carves a niche as a Web designer-yet he yearns to be a painter. Suddenly, these middle-class and ordinary lives will come together again in an extraordinary way.

The death of their proud, spirited mother draws the Saperstones home to the New York resort town of Saratoga Springs. Gathered again in the family's ramshackle cottage, they discover a stunning legacy from 1916. Almost a century ago, the legendary "Vagabonds"-captains of industry Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, inventor Thomas Edison, and naturalist John Burroughs-came to this town during one of their road trip adventures. Here they encountered a beautiful young woman, whom they would burden with a scandalous secret and a dazzling windfall. Now, when decades later this inheritance comes to the three Saperstones, it will utterly transform them-not so much for the riches it brings, but for how it will reconfigure the past they share...and a future they had thought beyond their grasp. Arresting in its poignancy and indelibly original, The Vagabonds is a brilliant marriage of a truth stranger than fiction and a fiction filled with transcendent truth.

About the author

Nicholas Delbanco has published twenty-four books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent novels are The Count of Concord and Spring and Fall; his most recent works of nonfiction are The Countess of Stanlein Restored and The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life. As editor he has compiled the work of, among others, John Gardner and Bernard Malamud. Director of the Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan, he has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards, received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, twice, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship.