The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

On the heels of the election of 2016, Samantha Raymond’s life begins to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into ‘the Mids’ – that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of an unravelling nation. When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighbourhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life – and her family – as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother and a daughter.