An old shoe factory in a coastal New England town is up for sale again. When a private equity mogul with a fondness for the factory's shoes buys it he sets in motion a story with profound implications for the way we live today. For the people of Bealport depend on Norumbega. Their livelihoods, their self-respect, their interconnectedness, are all at stake. The shadow of factories fate looms over the people of town. Idiosyncratic and humane; a cast that small communities under threat produce. Bealport is a portrait of a place, at once sympathetic, mordant, unsparing, comic, tragic, and universal, and of a way of life that is passing. It is a novel of a town, and to no small degree of every town, in America and beyond.