Corduroy

Ginger McVeagh faces a Christmas alone on her family's remote Texas ranch, Dos Pozos, after losing her brother Aleck to the trenches of the Great War. She has taken over the running of the ranch with quiet determination, burying her grief in work and solitude. Then Dean Wolcott arrives at her door, her brother's wartime comrade bearing a final letter and a weight of memories she isn't ready to face. His presence unsettles her in ways she doesn't understand. Here is a man who knew the brother she idolized, who shared the horrors she can only imagine, who looks at her with something that feels dangerously like desire. As holiday guests descend on the ranch, Ginger must navigate new relationships, old wounds, and the terrifying possibility that life might actually ask her to live again. Written in 1923, this is a novel about the particular loneliness of grief and the even more frightening territory of letting someone in.