Evoking the same small town charm with the same great eye for character, the coauthor of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society finds her own voice in this new novel about a young
debutante working for the Federal Writer’s Project whose arrival in Macedonia, West Virginia, changes the course of history for a prominent family who has been sitting on a secret for
decades.
Miss Layla Beck, the daughter of a powerful Senator from Delaware, is forced to get a job with the Federal Writer’s Project writing the first official account of Macedonian history. Her
notions of real life—the social whirl of Newport and New York—are totally upended when rooms with the overly eccentric Romeyn. The Romeyns are a fixture in the town, their identity tied to its
knotty history. As Layla embarks on this grand adventure, her first friend, the town librarian Ms. Betts, wisely cautions: “There is a problem with history. All of us see a story according to
our own lights. None of us is capable of objectivity.”
Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, this is an intimate novel of love and family, of history and truth, and of struggle and hope, filled with the kind of characters that, once
you discover, you’ll never forget.