A Publishers Weekly Best Book
Jack Lambeau is the prodigal son returned home to Lakeland, New York; the Ivy-League educated architectural visionary brought home to reinvent the dying port town and smooth over its self imposed scars. His friend, Steven Turner is the Brooklyn-born local reporter who will bear witness to the city’s successes and failures. Between them come Jack’s beautiful fiancee Anne--an artist with secrets of her own - and his undisciplined brother Harris, hired by Jack to remove the suspicious barrels of waste from Lakeland’s broken heart.
As the town struggles to find a new identity, these four characters must find their way through their own unexpected transformations and along the way attempt to answer the questions that plague us all: what is the price of loyalty, filialty, goodness and love?

Tom Barbash's profile page

Thomas Barbash‘s fiction has appeared in Tin House, Story, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. A Michener Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has also served as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and is the recipient of a Nelson Algren Award. He is also the co-author, with Howard Lutnik, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, of Top of the World(HarperCollins, September 2002). Born and raised in New York, he currently lives in San Francisco.

“In The Last Good Chance Tom Barbash brings fresh seriousness and sympathy and wit to bear on the ancient problem of loyalty. This is an ambitious, deftly plotted, multifariously satisfying piece of genuine American realism.”—Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections
“Here is a wonderful book. Humorous, poignant, filled with people we either know or have been—we watch, spellbound, as characters and a town struggle to invent and re-invent themselves, and to ultimately save themselves as well.” —Elizabeth Strout, author ofAmy and Isabelle
“Barbash has imbued his first novel with a strong and evocative sense of place...reminds me of Russell Banks’s writing. The Last Good Chanceis heady, lyrical—and darkly funny...it’s a pleasure to read.” —Meg Wolitzer, author of Surrender Dorothy

“In The Last Good Chance Tom Barbash brings fresh seriousness and sympathy and wit to bear on the ancient problem of loyalty. This is an ambitious, deftly plotted, multifariously satisfying piece of genuine American realism.”—Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections
“Here is a wonderful book. Humorous, poignant, filled with people we either know or have been—we watch, spellbound, as characters and a town struggle to invent and re-invent themselves, and to ultimately save themselves as well.” —Elizabeth Strout, author ofAmy and Isabelle
“Barbash has imbued his first novel with a strong and evocative sense of place...reminds me of Russell Banks’s writing. The Last Good Chanceis heady, lyrical—and darkly funny...it’s a pleasure to read.” —Meg Wolitzer, author of Surrender Dorothy