The Orchard at the End of the Road
A novel. Forthcoming.
I had been driving for four hours when the road forgot what it was. I had been told in the email that the road would feel old. That was the word the email used. Old. It was not the word I would have used. The word I would have used was made.
I came around a bend and the road ended. Not in a barrier. Not in a cliff. The packed earth simply stopped, and beyond it was a yard, and at the back of the yard was a cottage made of stone the color of wet bark, and behind the cottage was the orchard.
The Book
A pomologist arrives at a southern Appalachian orchard that has been waiting two hundred years for her. The god beneath it is starving. The man charged with feeding him is following a discipline her own ancestor wrote. And the practice that will actually work is one the women of the valley used to keep, before the men erased them.
The Orchard at the End of the Road is the first book of a series about old gods, claimed women, and the woods that never let anyone leave.