The Lund Covenant
A Novel
Coming June 30, 2026
When Gill Lund returns to Castle Dale, Utah after his father's death, he intends to stay three days. Long enough to bury the man, settle the estate, and go back to the life he built on the other side of twelve years and a lot of open country.
The town has other plans.
His father — quiet, stubborn, not a man who explained himself — had been driving into the desert at odd hours, tending water caches hidden in the San Rafael Swell. Desert travelers in desperate need. Small mercies, unmarked and unannounced. Until someone found them and destroyed them, methodically, with bleach and a serrated blade.
The evidence leads somewhere no one in Castle Dale wants to look. And the more Gill asks, the more he understands that his father's silence wasn't indifference — it was the posture of a man who had already paid the cost of speaking plainly in a small town, and who kept doing the work anyway.
Gill is a photojournalist. He knows how to document things. What he doesn't know yet is whether he's willing to be part of the story.
About the Book
The Lund Covenant is a novel about moral inheritance — the obligations that place imposes, the cost of bearing witness, and what changes when a man decides to stay. Set in the high desert of Emery County, Utah, it follows a photojournalist's reckoning with a small Mormon community fracturing under the weight of a secret that was never meant to surface.
Literary fiction with a suspense spine, The Lund Covenant belongs on the shelf next to Kent Haruf's Plainsong, Ron Rash's Serena, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and Paulette Jiles's News of the World.
~82,000 words · Hardcover & Ebook · June 30, 2026
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Available June 30, 2026.
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About the Author
Greg Maxfield writes literary fiction grounded in the American West. He grew up around Castle Dale, Utah, where his family helped settle the Emery County high desert, and his work returns again and again to that country — its people, its silences, and the moral weight of place.