Then I'll Come Back to You

The year the rain forgot to fall, a boy walks out of the mountains and into town carrying nothing but an enormous steel trap and a head full of dreams. Stephen O'Mara has never seen a town before. Raised in near-solitude by a rough old man called Old Tom, he knows the wilderness intimately but nothing of roads, or schools, or the way people live pressed together in communities. When Caleb Hunter first spots him, dust-caked and gap-toothed, wearing clothes three sizes too big, he sees something that stops him cold: a boy who doesn't yet know what he doesn't know. The novel unfolds in the brutal heat of that drought summer, following Stephen's tentative steps into a world of social expectations and class, where his wilderness directness alternately charms and unsettles the townspeople. This is a story about the collision of innocence with experience, and the fierce, fragile hope that drives a boy raised in poverty to hunger after education and belonging. Evans writes with a poet's eye for the land, making the drought-stricken hills and the promise of cool mountains into characters themselves. For readers who love quiet, coming-of-age stories with an old-fashioned sensibility and a heart that aches in the best way.