Liberty Landing

Liberty Landing -- a 2016 Finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction -- narrates the American Experience of the 21st century through the lives of a polycultural cast of natives immigrants and refugees in Azyl Park--a town in the Midwest. After Angeline Lalande a journalist and historian unearths the real meaning of the name Azyl conferred on the town in the 1800s by immigrant-hating politicians the town elders begin the act of renaming it. During the course of the renaming we meet the intriguing denizens of the town--survivors strugglers and strivers of every race and nationality see the intersection of their lives and the ways they find home heaven and haven in each other. We learn about the singular journeys that brought them to Azyl Park--a place that both transforms them and is transformed by them. The larger story of the American Experiment is told through the personal story of Alexander Hamilton the essential immigrant among the Founding Fathers as Angeline writes a book about him. By the end of the novel after Azyl Park is renamed each of the characters has lost or found something essential. Liberty Landing is about the personal and the political family and loss memory and migration finding new love and a new home and about history and the American Experiment. Seminal moments of the American Experience figure in this literary and historical fiction. Inspired by John Dos Passos USA Trilogy about early 20th century Americans Liberty Landing is a sweeping lush layered saga set in a vibrant community with a diverse international cast of characters marked by neuroses flaws secrets unspeakable pasts humor warmth vulnerability and humanity. Liberty Landing is Gail Vida Hamburgs love letter to the American Experiment--the first in a trilogy.