Critical Praise

”RUIN is a dangerously psychological romantic nightmare about a young couple’s loss and redemption. When disgraced financier Frank Campbell and his also bankrupted wife Francy escape Manhattan, they bottom out at an abandoned farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. As their marriage teeters, Frank takes up fly fishing and through it and hard artisanal work begins life again --- until things go deeply wrong again. Seippel unfurls this tragicomic tale in a haunting manner, deeply echoing the vulnerability of early Hemingway and the bitterness of T.S. Eliot. The journey is thrilling, its vividly evolving characters long memorable.”

—Barnaby Conrad III, author of GHOST HUNTING IN MONTANA and JACQUES VILLEGLÉ AND THE STREETS OF PARIS

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

—Noah Broyles, author of THE HOUSE OF DUST

“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.”

—Chase Pletts, author of THE LOVING WRATH OF ELDON QUINT (Spur Award winner, 2022)