“Laird Harrison has captured both the ardent optimism and the giddy naivete
of an era when anything seemed possible, even a new definition of love.”

– Dashka Slater, author of The Wishing Box (Chronicle 2000) which the Los Angeles Times chose as one of the best books of 2000.

“In his astonishing novel, Fallen Lake, Laird Harrison strips the rosy veils from the heads of the flower children and shows the hippies for what they were. Fallen Lake not only reveals the middle class’s angst, but the unacknowledged and permanently damaged victims of the ‘60s—not the flower children, but their children. With a clear and unsentimental eye, and in flawless sharp-edged prose, Harrison gives us a modern-day Blithedale Romance.”

– Eric Miles Williamson, author of Two-Up (Texas Review Press 2006) and East Bay Grease (Picador 1999); board member, National Book Critics Circle; editor, American Book Review.

“The key to the current confusion about relationships and marriage lies deeper in the past than the sixties and seventies, but that’s when experimentation went mainstream and caught middle-class Americans in its hazardous flow. Laird Harrison’s characters aren’t big-city bohemians or college students made heady with sudden independence but softball-playing suburban moms and dads with adolescent children in tow. Written with grace, humor, intelligence, and an inspiring affection for human nature, Fallen Lake deftly examines the history of two couples and four children in one turbulent household of the past, as well as the present life of one of the daughters grown to adulthood and yearning to save her own marriage.”

– Anastasia Hobbet, author of Small Kingdoms (Permanent Press 2010) and The Pleasure of Believing (Soho 1997)