The Last Good Chance: A Novel

A Publishers Weekly Best Book

Jack Lambeau is the prodigal son returned home to Lakeland, New York; the Ivy-League educated architectural visionary brought home to reinvent the dying port town and smooth over its self imposed scars. His friend, Steven Turner is the Brooklyn-born local reporter who will bear witness to the city's successes and failures. Between them come Jack's beautiful fiancee Anne--an artist with secrets of her own - and his undisciplined brother Harris, hired by Jack to remove the suspicious barrels of waste from Lakeland's broken heart.

As the town struggles to find a new identity, these four characters must find their way through their own unexpected transformations and along the way attempt to answer the questions that plague us all: what is the price of loyalty, filialty, goodness and love?

Thomas Barbash's fiction has appeared in Tin House, Story, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. A Michener Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has also served as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and is the recipient of a Nelson Algren Award. He is also the co-author, with Howard Lutnik, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, of Top of the World (HarperCollins, September 2002). Born and raised in New York, he currently lives in San Francisco.