Heart of Dist Forest

Andrew Lachlan, retired history professor & widower, has been given roughly a year to live. He begins a journal while living in his childhood home in North Carolina, hoping to eventually make some sense of his life & impending death. What he experiences is far more than he expected, with the world intruding on his solitude & insisting upon his involvement. Love, passion, grief, parental & human obligation all disrupt his life ... but they also enrich it. There isn't much more to say about the plot. Better to enter into this thoughtful but haunted man's life, day by day, experiencing the subtle beauties of Nature, the troubling & irresistible knots of human relationship, the wrestling with ghosts & intangible doubts. But don't be afraid that it all might be a little too solemn, even too grim! While there's plenty of quiet drama, there's also humor & joy in these pages. So, what about that hope of making sense of life & death? It's not quite that neat & tidy, with several threads left undone as the final pages approach. But Andrew does come to a deeper understanding of his life & of himself. Never maudlin, composed with a sure & understated hand, this is a superb novel. Most highly recommended!

Having grown up not 50 miles from the setting of the Heart of a Distant Forest, I recognized the reality of the characters immediately. Philip Lee Williams' debut novel is a deeply insightful tale of a search for meaning at life's closing. The protagonist, Andrew Lachlan, is drawn with the finest pen, a beautifully captured representative of the academic Southern Gentleman. Lachlan finds himself betrayed by a body whose physical strength had been so important and perhaps more importantly, torn between a conservative heart and a liberal mind. Seeking acceptance and understanding of his life he retires to contemplate the end of his days in solitude. The novel is told as Lachlan's journal and is primarily a character study of this contradictory man, caught between his need for an almost paralyzing self-analysis and a desire to embrace life without regard for the consequences. Fear and love, intimacy and reserve, all do quiet battle for Lachlan's soul.