by Greg Maxfield (Author)
A literary novel of the American West - set in the red-rock country of Emery County, Utah, where silence is its own language and the desert keeps what people bury.
When Gill Lund returns to Castle Dale, Utah after his father's death, he means to stay three days. Long enough to bury the man, settle the estate, and get back to the life he built on the far side of twelve years and a lot of open country.
The town has other plans.
His father - quiet, stubborn, never a man who explained himself - had been driving into the desert at odd hours, tending water caches hidden in the San Rafael Swell. Small mercies for travelers in desperate need, unmarked and unannounced. Until someone found them and destroyed them, methodically, with bleach and a serrated blade.
Gill is a photojournalist. He has spent his career learning how to frame other people's conflicts and walk away. Now the evidence leads somewhere no one in Castle Dale wants to look - into a small Mormon community fracturing under the weight of a secret it was never meant to surface - and he has to decide whether he is willing to step into the story instead of standing behind the camera.
The Lund Covenant is a novel about moral inheritance: the obligations that place imposes, the cost of bearing witness, and what changes when a man decides to stay.
Comparable to Kent Haruf's Plainsong, Ron Rash's Serena, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and Paulette Jiles's News of the World.
Greg Maxfield grew up in Emery County, Utah. The Lund Covenant is his debut novel. Approximately 82,000 words. Available in paperback and hardcover editions.
Number of Pages: 312
Dimensions: 0.65 x 9 x 6 IN
Publication Date: June 30, 2026
