Nelly Channell

On a bleak November day, Rhoda Farren returns to Huntsdean, her childhood home, only to discover that nothingawaiting her is as she left it. Her cousin Helen now inhabits the rooms where Rhoda once belonged, and into this fractured domesticity has come a baby, small and demanding, along with the weight of Helen's distress, a husband whose actions have brought shame and difficulty. As Rhoda navigates the changed halls and altered dynamics of her own family, she must confront what she fled, what she resents, and what she might be called to forgive. The novel unfolds as a quiet but devastating examination of familial duty, of holding grudges against those who need us most, and of the peculiar courage required to rebuild rather than retreat. Doudney writes with sharp psychological precision about the way resentment and love can coexist in the same heart, and how returning home sometimes means returning to oneself.