A grieving widow.
A forgotten orchard.
A family secret waiting to be found.

Two years after losing her husband, fifty-six-year-old Emerson Haven has become very good at staying busy enough to avoid the silences. She poured everything she had into the corporate career that carried her through the worst of her grief, and then the company replaces her with a woman half her age and escorts Emerson out with twenty-two years of her life packed into a cardboard box.

With no job, no plan, and no desire to spend another decade proving she’s still useful, Emerson does the most reckless thing she’s ever done. She buys an abandoned apple orchard in upstate New York from one terrible photograph.

Wildflower Ridge isn't quite the peaceful refuge she'd imagined. The farmhouse is uninhabitable, the barn leans alarmingly, eight hundred apple trees have gone wild, and her new home is a mouse-scented vintage Airstream named Dolores. Before long, Emerson has also acquired a suspicious stray dog, a young mechanic who can repair almost anything, an elderly couple who refuse to let her eat alone, and a quiet beekeeper who seems to understand that some wounds shouldn’t be hurried.

As Emerson works to restore the orchard and reopen its long-silent cider house, she discovers an old journal hidden inside the wall and begins to wonder whether starting over requires more than changing where she lives. Then, one day, she finally opens the box of her husband’s belongings. What she finds inside rewrites the marriage she thought she understood.

Set among apple blossoms, honeybees, autumn storms, and one notoriously ill-behaved bear, The Cider House on Wildflower Ridge is a heartfelt story of later-in-life reinvention, unexpected family, and the courage it takes to stop outrunning the past long enough to build a future.

Amazon
Apple
Nook
Kobo
Google Play