Eden’s Clock
The 12th stand-alone and final book of The American Novels series.
●Washington Post‘s “Historical Fiction to Read”
●The New York Times‘s “Rich, Immersive New Historical Fiction”
“With Eden’s Clock, Lock concludes a 12-volume series of stand-alone homages to America’s 19th-century literature… Blending fictional characters with references to a host of writers from Twain to Melville to (in this final novel) Jack London… [R]endered with an eloquence any journalist would envy.”
—The New York Times
“An epic journey that rivals Twain’s picaresque novels.”
—New York Sun
“A thrilling, episodic novel of big ideas and national traumas.”
—Kirkus
“Lock’s final title in his resplendent American Novels series . . . poignantly explores the nature of human connection. Rich in period detail and memorable characters, this is a fitting conclusion to the series.”
—Booklist
“Lock’s skill in crafting an adventure novel . . . would be at home on shelves a century ago. By peppering his narrative with contemporary references and turns-of-phrase evocative of the early twentieth century, Lock succeeds in bringing the era to life.”
—Historical Novel Society
“Lock offers no easy answers to the questions his narrative raises about progress, justice, and the weight of accumulated trauma. Instead, he provides something rarer: a novel that honors the complexity of the past while insisting on its relevance to the present. In the face of today’s efforts to sanitize American history that challenges national mythologies, Lock’s commitment to nuanced truth-telling feels both necessary and brave.”
—Jonathan Crain
ISBN: 9781954276383 | Ebook ISBN: 9781954276390 | Bellevue Literary Press | July 4, 2025
Rendered mute at the Battle of Gettysburg, Frederick Heigold returns to Dobbs Ferry, New York, where he marries a resolute suffragist and resumes his vocation as a clocksmith. Bereft after she dies in a freak accident, he accepts a commission to repair the enormous clock on the San Francisco Embarcadero, but the routine railway journey becomes a six-month odyssey. Finally reaching the Pacific, after having survived imprisonment, shipwreck on Edisto Island, and run-ins with assorted roughnecks and thieves, he happens upon novelist Jack London drinking in the Palace Hotel bar—just before one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history.
Eden’s Clock, the twelfth and final stand-alone book in The American Novels series, calls into question the American belief in individualism to shape our destiny when confronted with irrepressible, chaotic forces.
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PRAISE FOR Eden’s Clock and The American Novels series
“Norman Lock has created a memorable portrait gallery of American subjects, in a succession of audaciously imagined, wonderfully original, and beautifully written novels unlike anything in our literature.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“Entwining individual and collective fates, the immersive, propulsive historical novel Eden’s Clock sprawls across the early twentieth-century US.”
—Forward Reviews
“Eden’s Clock is the latest release in Norman Lock’s outstanding American Novels series and perhaps one of the best. Combining the Civil War with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake is pure genius”
—Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore (Spokane, WA)
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RELATED:
- BLP Conversations: Norman Lock & Constantin Severin
- Norman Lock on Literature, History, and his American Novels Cycle: A Series Published by Bellevue Literary Press
- An Interview with Meg Nolan of Foreword Reviews.
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NORMAN LOCK has written novels, short fiction, and poetry as well as stage plays, dramas for German radio, a film for The American Film Institute, and scenarios for video-art installations. His plays have been produced in the U.S., Germany, at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, and in Turkey. His work has been translated into Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, Polish, Greek, and Japanese.
He received the Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review, the Literary Fiction Prize, given by The Dactyl Foundation of the Arts & Humanities, fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Lock can be contacted by email at normanglock [at] gmail [dot] com.
