Upstate: A Novel

Summary

A grieving writer. An abandoned bookshop. A secret love story hidden in letters.
From New York Times bestselling author Kim van Alkemade comes an unforgettable novel about found family, healing, and the power of the past to reshape the present.

Thirty-four-year-old writer Audrey Beacon is grieving alone during lockdown when a post about a bookshop for sale in upstate New York pops into her social media feed like a lifeline. Enthralled by the historic house and the massive barn bursting with books, Audrey impulsively makes an offer. Soon, she’s cashing out her savings, loading her possessions into her dead husband’s van, and fleeing Manhattan for the village of Schuywich, determined to outrun the ghosts of her past.

In 1956, it’s love at first sight when Schuywich librarian Hazel McIntyre meets dashing magazine writer Evelyn Cabot at a summer camp in Maine that discreetly promises a “different vacation for professional women.” By summer’s end, Evelyn has left Greenwich Village to move into an old farmhouse she’s bought in Hazel’s hometown. In her new column, “A Woman’s Place,” Evelyn writes about her adventures renovating a house, tending to sheep, and opening a bookshop in her barn with help from the woman readers know only as her “roommate.” Privately, Hazel chronicles their six-decade love story in a series of letters that abruptly end when they’re forced to abandon the bookshop in 2015.

Reopening the bookshop in the summer of 2020 attracts a quirky community of villagers who continuously interrupt Audrey’s solitude: An unemployed Broadway set designer. An ambitious teenage entrepreneur. A story-telling Adirondack grandmother. Then there’s Sam Rensselaer, the distractingly handsome representative of the agriculture extension. Past and present begin to converge when Audrey finds “A Woman’s Place,” in a stack of old magazines, but it’s the discovery of Hazel’s letters that brings hidden love and long-buried family secrets to light. Will Audrey find the courage to heal the wounds of the past—including her own?