Newswise — BINGHAMTON, N.Y. – S.G Grant, an award-winning professor of history education at Binghamton University, State University at New York, has published his first novel, Stealing Homer, under the pseudonym Geoffrey Scott.

Stealing Homer is equal parts amateur sleuth mystery, art treatise and examination of small-town life. Speaking to the idea that we all live lives defined by the positive and negative spaces around us, Geoffrey Scott introduces John McTavish, a man unmoored. His wife died, he resigned from his college teaching position, he moved to a cottage on the coast of Maine...and he is trying to reconnect with his son and to recreate himself as an artist.

The theft of a newly discovered Winslow Homer watercolor, a gay boy's awakening identity and McTavish's fledgling art career appear as random events with no surface-level connections. Woven in and around these actions, however, are the compelling, tragic and even funny lives of the townsfolk of fictional Rascal Harbor, Maine. 

University colleagues may be disappointed, or relieved, to know there is nothing in the book inspired by the Binghamton campus. “My thought has been to keep my academic self and novelist self separate; thus, the use of a pseudonym for the Rascal Harbor series,” said Grant.

Grant has published a number of academic books and journal articles. He’s also won the Exemplary Research Award from the National Council for the Social Studies. He has served as senior consultant, writer and project manager for the New York Social Studies Resource Toolkit project. He is a past recipient of the State University of New York Chancellors Award for Teaching.

This is his first work of fiction, but it won’t be his last.

“One small detail in Stealing Homer struck me as the seed for a second book,” said Grant. Motivated by that seed, and by the experience of producing his first novel in only three months, he said he was hooked.

“I wanted to see how the array of characters I introduced in Stealing Homer continued to interact with one another and with new characters and in new situations. And so, I guess I'll keep writing until I'm done with them (or they're done with me),” he said.

More information can be found at prospectivepress.com. Stealing Homer is available for purchase from the publisher’s website and can be ordered from all major book retailers.