My real problem with The Indian River was to determine whether it was a masterpiece or simply an American classic." Jim Harrison

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the borders of the United States remained blurred. Indian Stream, the Indian River, was a region in northern New Hampshire, bordering Canada. Many outlaws, trappers, and other farmers eager to escape justice had founded a small village there. This is where Blood decided to settle and start all over again.
Accompanied by Sally, a sixteen-year-old prostitute he won playing cards, he plans to open a tavern and sell the rum, gunpowder, and furs they have transported there. Sally, for her part, reserves the right to choose her customers. They both aspire to a peaceful life, but incidents multiply within the community, and Blood and Sally are soon singled out as the source of all the trouble. Tensions reach a peak when two young men arrive in the village and force Blood to confront his past. In prose that is at once dense, lucid, and seductive, and has been compared to that of Faulkner, Jeffrey Lent offers us a captivating tale: he draws us into the heart of the poverty and deprivation of a nascent society that, in the grip of self-destructive madness, loses its innocence.

" The Indian River is an exceptional novel about borders, memory, imagination, the old dream of becoming better by going to live elsewhere. (...) It is at once a love story, a parable and an East Coast Western. Colum McCann