The Wall Between

A hundred years of grudge sit between two New Hampshire farms in the shape of a half-ruined stone wall that neither family will claim or repair. Ellen Webster, seventy-five, close with money and quick with her tongue, works out that the surest way to keep her acres from her neighbor Martin Howe after she dies is an heir, so she writes to the orphaned niece she has never met and salts the letter with hints of an inheritance. Lucy comes east from Arizona in the spring of 1917, spirited enough to match her aunt but with no appetite for the feud, and the scheme starts to slip. Bassett keeps the village of Sefton Falls in dry focus, watching an inherited quarrel outlast everyone who had a reason for it.