El León Literary Arts

Announces publication of

The Way It Went

A novel by Ben Schwartz

Published in association with Mānoa Books, Honolulu 

ISBN:  9798987371817

Pub Date:  October, 2023 

Page Count:  215

Price:  $20 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) 

....eBook forthcoming soon....

• The Way It Went weaves a beautifully crafted history of a midwestern farm family from the 1930s to the present. The novel is told in different versions, primarily by three articulate women, schoolteachers all. Elspeth begins: childhood in Missouri, college years, and, after World War II, meeting Avery, a soldier scarred by the war, whom she marries and brings home to the family farm. There’s also the strong, roguish storytelling of Avery’s brother, filling the backstory of Avery’s family in North Dakota. In these vivid voices we come to know a family’s reckonings with ties that bind. Needs, wants, missteps, satisfactions. Heartbreak. Love. What emerges is a moving requiem for a land and a people: a time past but treasured.