Beneficence: A Novel
A family’s only hope to heal their broken lives is the belief that love is stronger than grief.
When they meet in the 1930s, Doris and Tup’s love is immediate. They marry quickly and Doris commits to the only life Tup ever wanted: working the Senter family farm, where his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents are buried under the old pines. Their lives follow the calming rhythms of the land—chores in the cow barn, haying the fields, tending their gardens—and in this they find immeasurable joy.
Soon their first child, Sonny, is born and Doris and Tup understand they are blessed. More children arrive—precocious, large-hearted Dodie and quiet, devoted Beston—but Doris and Tup take nothing for granted. They are grateful every day for the grace of their deep bonds to each other, to their family, and to their bountiful land. As they hold fast to this contentment, Doris is uneasy, and confesses, “We can’t ever know what will come."
When an unimaginable tragedy turns the family of five into a family of four, everything the Senters held faith in is shattered. The family is consumed by a dark shadow of grief and guilt. Slowly, the surviving Senters must find their way to forgiveness—of themselves and of each other.
New York Times bestselling author Meredith Hall’s radiant debut novel is a study of love—both its gifts and its obligations—that will stay with readers long after the last page. With a rare tenderness and compassion, Beneficence illuminates the heart's enduring covenants and compromises.
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Available as an Audiobook
Experience Beneficence as performed by a cast of three actors, each giving voice to a principal character.
Early Reviews for Beneficence
“The novel’s midcentury pastoral setting seems to distance it from the conventional pessimism of contemporary fiction… What impresses most is the patient, unforced manner with which [Hall] delineates her story of tragedy and gradual renewal… The counterweight to the grief that besets Beneficence is the profound satisfaction the Senters take from their daily labor on their land. This is also a finely observed novel of chores and routines and seasons, and of the sense of agency that can be reclaimed through the ‘covenant’ of work. As organically as it traveled to heartbreak, Beneficence progresses to the place of wisdom that lies beyond it, where we learn that a home is part of the ‘vast world of innocence and harm,’ not an island beyond it.”
—The Wall Street Journal (Full Review)
“Beneficence is one of the best novels I’ve read all year, the perfect antidote to troubled times, beautifully composed and lyrically told. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.”
—Manhattan Book Review (Full Review)
“Powerful… Hall's meticulous prose convincingly captures the daily realities—sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel—of agricultural life, and offers insight into the ways calamity fractures family bonds...readers will be rewarded.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This is a special book, nearly perfect. It is a story that lingers, and one that will remain with me for the remainder of my time in this world.”
—Bangor Daily News
“A quiet gem of a first novel. The author's lyrical prose and stark portrayal of grief and guilt…is conveyed so movingly this story is hard to put down. With language poetic in its cadence and capable of seamlessly transporting our minds and emotions to another place and time, this accomplished debut will be welcomed by readers of authors such as Willa Cather, Alice Munro, Amy Tan, or Lisa See.”
—Library Journal
“A family flounders in grief, but finds their way home through forgiveness and acceptance, in Beneficence, Meredith Hall’s gorgeous and moving new novel. There are no ostentatious displays, and so the novel’s magnificence sneaks up in the same unassuming way that autumn sunlight spills across harvested fields.…”
—Foreword Reviews
“Meredith Hall’s austere and luminous debut novel... is hewn, sinewy, with moments of electrifying beauty and grace.”
—The Boston Globe
“A powerful story of love and loss and endurance… [A] simple, profound tale… Remind[s] all readers that love, memories and stories, and indeed language itself, can have transcendent, radiant, beneficent power—even over death.”
—New York Journal of Books (Full Review)
“These voices from the past speak so clearly to our time, at a moment when many of us wonder whether we’ll lose the things that we consider blessings… Beneficence is a quiet but steady book, one that echoes ancient and important rhythms.”
—The Washington Post (Full Review)
“Beneficence is a novel that lingers, tucking details into its heavy folds…The weight of ache and grace that anchors [Hall’s] writing is still firmly lodged.”
—The Arts Fuse (Full Review)
"[Hall's] debut novel, Beneficence, brings readers achingly close to these ultimately existential questions of goodness and love by focusing on a single family’s unspooling... Beneficence is a glorious book, its joy as quietly beautiful as the tragedy at its center echoes loudly through the lives of its characters. Hall acknowledges that each life is very small, on its own, but that the love we each bear for one another is immense, our capacity for it endless."
—Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram (Full Review)
“With lyrical precision, Hall dissects how grief reshapes each [family] member and pushes them into newfound territory. The result is a profoundly moving family saga that provides an engrossing reading experience.”
—Public Libraries Online (Full Q&A)
Praise for Beneficence
“This fiercely beautiful novel took hold of me from the very first page. Beneficence is at once a page-turner and an artistic triumph. Meredith Hall takes on the old universal truths, as Faulkner once put it: love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. I loved this book, and will be thinking about the Senter family for a long time to come.”
—Dani Shapiro, New York Times bestseller
“An emotional journey so deep into the lives of others, you will find yourself, and the people you love, staring back with a face for each of Meredith Hall’s characters. One of the best books I’ve ever read, this quiet, family saga—a masterpiece of compassion and objectivity—has changed the way I see everyone around me, forever.”
—Simon Van Booy, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
“All novels are instruction kits for how they must be read. Meredith Hall’s novel Beneficence is forceful in this way and uniquely fruitful. Beneficence will remind a reader of Willa Cather in that it instructs us to savor life, to set aside our cold spirit, to notice human beings closely and tenderly, and to believe that telling life plainly is a virtue which can achieve beauty.”
—Richard Ford
“In the style of Marilynne Robinson and Stewart O'Nan, Hall writes with quiet urgency, drawing us close to the broken heart of one family's unspeakable loss. Hauntingly beautiful, emotionally devastating, and infused with great compassion, Beneficence shines a light on that liminal space between hate and affection, fate and freewill, mercy and grace—and the power we have to redeem or destroy those we love the most.”
—Kim Barnes, Pulitzer Prize finalist for In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country
“If the word ‘luminous” didn’t already exist, you’d have to invent it to describe Meredith Hall’s radiant new novel Beneficence.”
—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winner
“With wisdom and compassion, Meredith Hall writes about the capacity for atonement. She takes us into the soul of a farming family in Maine, into layers of hardship and joy. In this harsh landscape, Hall explores the courage to continue living, even in the most devastating moments. She shows us the generosity to see deeply, to live through fear and pain on your journey toward the awareness of splendor.”
—Ursula Hegi, New York Times bestselling author of Stones from the River
“Beneficence is a beautiful novel, quiet and meditative, exquisite in its language, moving in its emotional reach. It delivers a particular time and presence—a Maine farm in the 1950s—with deep love and understanding. This book is like a communion with the land.”
—Roxana Robinson, award-winning author of Dawson’s Fall
“I stand in awe of this author, and the poetry, honesty and tenderness of her storytelling... This book may break your heart, but it will also put your heart back together again.”
—Joyce Maynard, New York Times bestseller