by Giles Blunt
First published 2025
Paul Gascoyne arrives at the Trudeau Sanitarium in the Adirondack Mountains, his engagement recently broken. He takes work tutoring patients at this tuberculosis treatment facility in upstate New York. Among the patients, he meets Sarah Ballard, a young woman still bearing psychological wounds from surviving the Lusitania sinking. Paul finds himself increasingly attracted to Sarah despite her mysterious nature and troubled past. He encourages her to write about her experiences as a way to lift her spirits. Through reading her memoir, Paul discovers that Sarah's recollections blend reality with invention in ways he cannot untangle. When Sarah's health takes a turn for the worse, she fears her time is running short. She asks Paul to become the one person who will understand her completely. The novel explores their deepening connection against the backdrop of the sanitarium's isolated mountain setting, where both characters confront questions of truth, memory, and authentic intimacy.
Genres: romance, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, adult-fiction
Vibes: emotional, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Adirondack Mountains, Trudeau Sanitarium
Period: 20th-century
352 pages · Kindle Edition · Dundurn Press
Content warnings: mental-illness