In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden

Cambor (The Book of Mercy) deserves a wide readership for her second novel, set against the backdrop of the Johnstown, Pa., flood of 1889. The South Fork Dam separates two very different worlds: above it lies the exclusive South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, whose members include captains of industry like Henry Frick and Andrew Mellon; below it are scattered several working-class towns. When James Talbot, a lawyer hired to secure the club's charter, alerts the members to the earthen dam's structural problems, his warnings go unheeded. Talbot, haunted by his failure to serve in the Civil War, determines to assuage his guilt by keeping watch over the dam and its constant repairs, but the wealthy club members have no interest in the families living below South Fork. Cambor creates a fully imagined cast: Frank Fallon, a steel mill foreman and Civil War veteran; his wife, Julia, who lost two of her four children in the 1879 diphtheria epidemic; and their surviving son, 23-year-old Daniel, who studies Greek with Grace McIntyre, a librarian from Boston who has secrets of her own. Daniel falls in love with James Talbot's daughter, Nora, a budding naturalist and scholar who holds herself separate from the South Fork club members. Cambor has a gift for imparting much factual information lyrically and thrillingly: the process of manufacturing steel rods is rendered as beautifully as Nora's sexual awakening. Diamond sharp, deep and passionate, this is an accomplished, moving work. Agent, Heather Schroeder. (Jan.)