Revised Second Edition of PEN-Bellwether Prize Recognized Novel
Liberty Landing narrates the American experience of the twenty-first century through the lives of refugees, immigrants, and native-born citizens in Azyl Park, a small Midwestern town shaped as much by hope, reinvention, and transformation, as by fear.
When Angeline Lalande, a journalist and historian, uncovers the true origins of the town's name, "Azyl," bestowed in the nineteenth century by immigrant-hostile politicians, the town's elders initiate a fraught act of renaming. What begins as a civic gesture becomes a reckoning with history itself.
As the renaming unfolds, the lives of Azyl Park's inhabitants intersect and diverge. They seek home and haven in one another, and sometimes encounter heaven and hell there as well. Each carries a singular journey to America, and each must confront how the nation transforms those who arrive and those who remain.
By the time Azyl Park is renamed, every character has lost or found something essential. Liberty Landing is a novel of family and fracture, love and loss, belonging and exile, where the personal and the political are inseparable, and where the American experiment is revealed not as a fixed promise, but as a continuing moral test.
This tenth year anniversary edition includes allegorical,and philosophical revisions, and a final chapter and reflective afterword by the author that meets this cultural moment about the American Experiment and Experience.
