Ruin: A Novel of Flyfishing in Bankruptcy

by Leigh Seippel

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Ruin is a thoroughly engrossing novel about a young couple’s struggle back from financial catastrophe that so many of us dread. Having fled their urban life, they begin to build a new life together in a rural setting, far from former friends and colleagues—only to have it fall apart all over again in ways that could never be predicted.

Frank Campbell, a thirty-something former founding owner of a high-flying New York City-based hedge fund, has gone bankrupt, losing not only all his own money but the entire inherited fortune of his artist wife, Francy. The couple take refuge in an abandoned Hudson Valley farm shared with a resident herd of congenial goats. Frank is deeply shaken by the life-changing loss that has so thoroughly ruined their life together.

Frank tries to build a new microbrewery business on a shoestring but is haunted by the memory of passages from literature he revered as an undergraduate at Yale before jumping into finance. For Francy, her altered circumstances, after a lifetime of privilege, have galvanized her work as an artist and she distances herself from her struggling husband.

In the midst of it all, Frank takes up fly fishing on the nearby river, aspiring to join the local fishing club. Tragedy ensues during a fishing contest, further framing Frank as a “loser loner” in life. Only when he turns to fly fishing in earnest, traveling the world in search of the ever more perfect and elusive trout (and one memorable carp), does he find his way forward in “the yowling madness” of the world. 

Release date: September 6, 2022

Publisher: City Point Press

Print pages: 320

Sample

“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