Introduction

This vivid story opens with every couple’s nightmare—the disappearance of their comfortable known world. Ruin’s adventure explores the unpredictable progression of character and chance for Francy and Frank Campbell, newly destitute in their early thirties, along with their lovers and foes. And a murder investigator . . . .

Frank is another dreamer whose life is suddenly burned to the ground. More a disillusioned literature Ph.D. than an experienced financier, he had naively agreed to join his wife’s inheritance with his own personal guarantee of a college friend’s private equity partnership debt.

­The business implosion and subsequent bankruptcy took all their assets. Francy, an orphaned European heiress, now finds herself homeless, still married to pleasant, witty Frank—who had failed to protect them from disaster.

­The couple flees Manhattan to live at a desolate non-working Hudson Valley farm. Frank starts an artisanal brewery with a charismatic new eccentric friend. And, central to the heart of the story, he takes up fly fishing. A local doctor, perceiving Frank’s depression, prescribes that he gain some confidence through self-taught fishing.

Frank’s perceptions on the water are fresh and acute, sometimes colored by his memory of the words of famous writers, now painfully ironic in his life’s new context. ­ The novel weaves together fly fishing and life experiences that ultimately turn shockingly deadly.

And throughout, there is Francy’s story. Now in exile, she re-approaches painting with new and darkly complex emotional energy. Painting in reclusive concentration, she cuts Frank off, tacitly becoming her own woman. Her work’s enigmatic intensity attracts a wealthy neighbor who offers Francy a show in his Manhattan gallery and that attracts a great deal of trouble indeed.

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Excerpt

“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 view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

What would you do and where would you go if you lost all your money? Could you start over again? Would you want to remake your life completely?

Does Frank’s loss overwhelm his ability to see clearly who he is, and does he really understand Francy and what she needs?

What do you think is the main theme of the book? How does fly fishing come through? Is it as a metaphor, and if so, a metaphor for what?

How does the geographic setting of the book underpin the story?

How does the title make you feel about the characters and their development? Would you have given the book a different title or subtitle?
Which of the main characters meant the most to you? Who is stronger in the relationship, Frank or Francy?

How does the loss Frank and Francy experience resonate today?

What role does chance play in their lives? In all our lives?

Would you have wanted a different ending? If so, what would you like to have seen happen to the characters?

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