Lee Baldwin moves to Maine to revel in a tide of solitude and brood about her missing husband. Instead she's pulled into the daily dramas of Dolly, her flighty landlady; Maxine, the small town's store proprietor; a welder at Bath Iron works; a trio of boys running wild; and their mother, who may or may not have heard a saint speak. Lee feels especially the fierce grace of Hazel, an elderly woman whose grip on life breathes energy into her own. Evoking the lives of northern New Englanders who struggle in the shadow side of prosperity, Preservation explores the isolation—and possibilities—of a time before electronics linked us nonstop through the cloud. Cynthia Lang graduated from Smith College, won a Vogue Prix de Paris, and worked as a staff writer on Glamour. After free-lancing (Parents, Mademoiselle, Vogue Children, New York Times Magazine), she was co-author with Jerome Kagan of Psychology and Education: An Introduction (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), and with Harry Levinson, Executive (Harvard University Press), and Senior Associate at Education Development Center, Inc.