Release Date: May 5, 2026
Size: 6x9
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57869-222-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-57869-223-1
Library of Congress Control Number: coming soon
Booksellers and Libraries: Order Info Here or at Ingram.

Synopsis

While friendships grow and change over time, secrets can’t keep true friends apart.

Steven Bennett is a historian, chef, and programmer in the quaint rural towns of the Pioneer Valley. Rejected by his first love, he marries another woman and lives an ordinary life hosting barbecues and tip-toeing around a past extramarital affair. When Suzi Carpenter, the young woman who may or may not be his daughter, dies of a suspected overdose, Steven’s whole life, and the town, is upended. Set upon the backdrop of lush hills in Western Massachusetts, Steven embarks on a quest to discover what, or perhaps who, killed Suzi, only to unearth buried scars and hard truths about old friends.

Crystal Springs is literary fiction about the love of place, the bonds between found families, and the lasting love between friends.

Praise

“In Don Lesser’s debut novel, he has created Steven Bennett, the everyman character who finds a world of poets and artists as he searches for his own perch in a forty-year journey. If Steven thinks he can subdue the power of the past, he has underestimated the long game that the past plays, especially for those he loves. Peril simmers beneath the surface in Crystal Springs.”

—Jacqueline Sheehan, author of The Tiger in the House and five other novels
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“Lesser does a masterful job of exploring our choices in life and where they take us. Set in a small college town in New England in the late 70s, Lesser takes us on a decades-long journey through the eyes and experiences of a small group of friends as they navigate their place in the world. From artists to academics, these creative, yet deeply flawed characters wind their way through each other’s lives. Not everyone lives happily ever after, and through his characters, Lesser gives us an in-depth view of what makes us who we are.”

—Lisa Ekus, cookbook agent and media trainer

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“Set in a lush and vividly rendered landscape, Crystal Springs is a poignant exploration of belonging and betrayal, of the secrets we keep and the families we choose. As loyalties fray and truths unspool, love—sometimes unspoken, sometimes unrequited—surfaces in unexpected ways. With unsparing prose and quiet emotional force, Lesser’s debut lays bare the tangled bonds of friendship and the echoes of loss and longing that shape us.”

—Dori Ostermiller, founding director of Writers in Progress and author of Outside the Ordinary World

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“Soaring across forty years in its characters’ lives, Crystal Springs manages to portray the magic of youthful friendship—and its descent into cynicism and pain. Powerful prose, wry and unflinching. No one spared, least of all the reader.”

—Peter Medeiros, author of Deeply Gravely Quite Anxiously Concerned

Meet the Author

Don Lesser received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts. His food articles have won awards at the Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Crystal Springs is his third novel. His previous novels remain unpublished, though his MFA thesis novel, Deli, was published online in 2010.