Daphne Len Ben's novels are published in hardcover and in a uniform library edition, and are carried by most independent bookstores and public library systems in lower Michigan. This page describes the books themselves; for availability, ask at your local bookstore or library — every copy ordered through a local shop is a small vote for the kind of street where stories are still sold by people who read them.
2019
The Orchard at Hollow Creek
Daphne Len Ben
Novel · Debut · 312 pages
The Orchard at Hollow Creek
When Martin Vale dies in the last week of apple season, his three grown children return to the family orchard on a bend of the Grand River east of Portland, Michigan, to settle an estate that turns out to be anything but settled. The will is clear; the land is not. A boundary line drawn by their grandfather in 1938 — and a handshake agreement with the family on the other side of it — forces the Vales to reckon with what their father actually owed his neighbors, and what the orchard cost the people who kept it alive while the children were away becoming other people. Set across one harvest, from the first picking to the last pressing of cider, the novel asks what a family farm is worth once the family no longer farms.
The trees outlived every argument planted beneath them.
The Orchard at Hollow Creek, chapter nine
2022
What the Lake Remembers
Daphne Len Ben
Novel · 288 pages
What the Lake Remembers
Greta Marlowe has not set foot on Lake Lansing since the summer of 1968, when she was seventeen and her mother was still young. Now her mother is gone, the cottage is hers to sell, and Greta drives up from Cincinnati intending to stay three days. She stays the whole season. As she sorts a lifetime of kept things — report cards, a mildewed rowboat, a box of letters addressed to someone she never knew — the lake begins returning what the family put into it, and the summer of 1968 slowly rearranges itself into the truth. A novel about memory as a body of water: still on the surface, everything moving underneath.
A lake does not forgive, she thought. It only keeps.
What the Lake Remembers, final chapter
2025
Winter Count
Daphne Len Ben
Novel · 264 pages
Winter Count
After forty-one years teaching English at East Lansing High School, Howard Pell retires in June and is entirely lost by November. So he begins a tally — one mark in a notebook for each day of winter, and beside each mark, one true sentence about the day. The sentences accumulate into a portrait of a single street: the widow across Albert Avenue who salts her sidewalk before dawn, the graduate student upstairs who practices the cello badly and then less badly, the mail carrier who is always, somehow, the first to know everything. By the thaw, Howard's count has become something he never expected to write again — a reason to get up. A short, quiet novel about attention, and the winter it takes to learn it.
He had graded ten thousand essays and never once written down his own life.
Winter Count, chapter two
