Heart Spring Mountain

It's August 2011, and Tropical Storm Irene has just wreaked havoc on Vermont, flooding rivers and destroying homes. One thousand miles away—while tending bar in New Orleans—Vale receives a call saying that her mother, Bonnie, has disappeared. Despite a years-long estrangement from Bonnie, Vale drops everything and returns home to look for her.
But the hometown that Vale comes back to is not the one she left eight years earlier, and she finds herself falling back into the lives of the family she thought she'd long since left behind. As Vale begins her search, the narrative opens up and pitches back and forth in time to follow three generations of women—a farming widow, a back-to-the-land dreamer, an owl-loving hermit—as they seek love, bear children, and absorb losses. All the while, Vale's search has her unwittingly careening toward a family-origin secret more stunning than she ever imagined.
In this evocative first novel, PEN/New England Award–winning author Robin MacArthur returns to her vivid descriptions of the stark but beautiful rural Vermont landscape and the people who carve out lives for themselves there, crafting an arresting story about coming home, finding hope in the dark, and the power of the land to connect and to heal. Heart Spring Mountain is a stunning and captivating exploration of the small fractures that can make families break—and the lasting ties that bind them together.

Robin MacArthur lives and works on the farm where she was born in Vermont. She is the author of Half Wild: Stories (winner of the 2017 PEN/New England Award), the editor of Contemporary Vermont Fiction: An Anthology, and one-half of the indie-folk duo Red Heart the Ticker.