Lake Song. A Novel in Stories

2024 Winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction

[An] insightful, often drily witty novel-in-stories...All of these finely crafted stories are haunted...not just by the dead by by missed connections, bungled romances, links broken between parents and children. These well-wrought miniatures add up to an engrossing multifamily epic. -Kirkus

This book dazzles and surprises, from line to line, page to page, and decade to decade over the course of these finely wrought characters’ lives.
—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Like the glittering lakes, rivers, and waterfalls that surge through this remarkable work, Lake Song pulses with beauty, danger, and long-hidden secrets. These profoundly linked stories are masterful and moving, and I am in awe of the vibrant, delightfully cohesive, and absolutely real world Lesley Bannatyne has created in this tour de force.
—Daphne Kalotay, author of The Archivists 

A masterpiece of literary eloquence, originality, and historical fiction, Lake Song showcases author Lesley Bannatyne's genuine flair for the kind of richly enhanced and narrative driven storytelling style that keeps the reader's rapt and fully engaged attention from beginning to end. While especially and unreservedly recommended for community and college/university library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that this 'novel in stories' paperback edition from Mad Creek Books is also readily available in a digital book format—Midwest Book Review

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The linked stories of Lake Song, set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region, span decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the twentieth century hurtles forward. Against a backdrop of historical events—bootlegging, Klan attacks, gold smuggling, the Albany Ketchup Murders, the 1965 Northeast blackout—a generations-long mystery unwinds. In 1906 Mavis Staunch drowns in Okisee Lake days after she refuses to sell her land to a trio of brothers. The same night, one of the brothers, Angus Epps, doesn’t come home. Few suspect the two events are connected, and no one imagines the role that a ten-year-old boy, a canoe, and a pack of coyotes play in the tragedies. Spiritualists, grifters, sugar makers, arsonists, seekers, and saleswomen wind through each other’s lives and across decades to add layers of resonance to each captivating story. The mercurial lake that unites the people of Kinder Falls sustains as much as it haunts, both witness and diary.

MORE ABOUT LAKE SONG:

"The Final Girl" featured in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading: The Strange Lady Will Not Hand Back Her Baby, August 2025
https://electricliterature.com/the-final-girl-by-lesley-pratt-bannatyne/