There is a particular silence that comes when a book is finally finished. Not the satisfied quiet you expect, but something closer to the hush in a house after the last guest leaves. For two years The Lund Covenant lived only with me - in notebooks, in the margins of maps, in the long drives where I argued with characters who weren’t there. As of today, it lives with you. That is a stranger feeling than I knew it would be.

The Lund Covenant is available now in paperback and hardcover, with the Kindle edition following close behind.

A Book About Going Home

I did not set out to write a book about home. I set out to write about a man named Gill Lund, a photojournalist who has spent his adult life pointing a camera at other people’s troubles, and who returns to Castle Dale, Utah only to bury his father and settle the estate. Three days, he tells himself. In and out.

But the desert had other plans for him, the way it tends to. What Gill finds out there - water caches tended in secret, then destroyed - is not the kind of thing a man can photograph and walk away from. The closer he looks, the more he understands that his father’s silence was never indifference. It was the posture of someone who had already paid the price of speaking plainly in a small town, and who kept doing the quiet work anyway.

I grew up in that country. The San Rafael Swell is not a metaphor to me, and I tried hard not to let it become one on the page. It is the ground people stand on while they make their hardest decisions. It keeps its own counsel. It outlasts everyone who claims it.

What I Hope It Asks of You

I am wary of telling readers what a novel means. A book that can be summarized in a sentence probably did not need to be written. But I can tell you the question that kept me at the desk: what do we owe the people who came before us, and what does it cost to honor that debt out loud?

Gill is a man who knows how to document things. What he does not know, for most of the book, is whether he is willing to be part of the story rather than a witness to it. I think most of us carry some version of that question. I know I do.

With Gratitude

If you have been following along on The Unfolding Plot, where the novel has been serializing chapter by chapter, thank you for reading it the slow way. If you are new here, welcome - the whole story is now yours to read at your own pace.

You can find the book on Amazon, and I would be grateful if, once you have finished, you left a few honest words in a review. For a debut novelist, a handful of readers willing to say what they thought is worth more than any advertisement I could buy.

A book is a private thing right up until the moment it isn’t. Today it leaves home. Thank you for giving it somewhere to go.

• Greg