The Keeper - Hardcover

by Joan Vincent (Author)

"Luminous writing. Observations, psychological and those that bounce off the natural world, are daring and precise, real leaps of courage that work," said Carol Shields, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Stone Diaries.

A homeless man's mysterious and brutal assault of an interior designer engaged in the renovation of Moses Rocket, a 19th-century New England mill complex, ratchets up tensions within the team tasked with completing the project.

The Keeper is framed in the world of corporate design and chronicles behind-the-scenes decision-making and conflicts at the architectural firm charged with managing the Moses Rocket renovation for one of Hartford's leading insurance companies. Katherine, the project's senior designer, is determined to hold to her purist vision of how the historic buildings should be restored; Sy, the project architect, is focused less on aesthetics and more on enhancing his own career and his extra-marital affair with a woman he's been obsessed with since adolescence; Lucy, Katherine's sister-in-law, the firm's sole female architect, grief-stricken by her husband's recent death, is wounded professionally when the project she hoped to lead is awarded to Sy, and she is assigned a subordinate role. Rangy Barstow's attack on Katherine is the first in a series of misguided attempts to halt reconstruction at the mill where he and generations of his family had once lived and worked.

Vincent's narrative weaves a complex tapestry of ambition, grief, and resilience, revealing the stark realities of professional and personal life. In supple, modulated prose, Vincent traces vivid portraits of each character's growth and eventual renewal. The Keeper is at times disquieting, often humorous, but ultimately hopeful with the emergence of unanticipated possibilities.