Old Newgate Road

The story of a father's return to his childhood home--the site of unspeakable tragedy--and of the complex and often warring obligations we have to our family, our friends, and our past. Old Newgate Road runs through the tobacco fields of northern Connecticut that once drove the local economy. It's where Cole Callahan spent his youth, in a historic white colonial that his family was devoted to restoring--painstakingly, relentlessly, pointlessly. Cole has not come back to this house, to this street, in thirty years--not since he was a teenager, when one night his father murdered his mother in a fit of rage. When he finally dares risk it, he is shocked to discover his elderly father, freed from prison, living alone in their old home and succumbing to dementia. Matters grow even more complicated when Cole's estranged wife calls to say their ultra-progressive, rabble-rousing son has been expelled from high school. And so Cole summons Daniel to Connecticut to work in the tobacco fields--his own job growing up. What unfolds over this summer surprises and challenges them all, as they contend with the sinister history they share and desperately try to invent a future that isn't doomed by it. Moving, insightful, and suspenseful, Old Newgate Road is a masterful portrait of a haunted family and successive generations of men struggling against all odds and often violent impulses to truly know one another and their loved ones, and to somehow come to terms with themselves.