First published 2025
Jane has spent her teenage years in an isolated Montana cabin with her father, living off their vegetable garden and reading nineteenth-century philosophy instead of attending school. Her father claims they moved off the grid after her mother died in a Bay Area car crash, seeking a simple existence away from modern society. He remains secretive about their past and rarely leaves their remote home. When Jane discovers that her loyalty to her father has made her complicit in a terrible crime, she runs away to San Francisco to search for the truth about her mother and their former life. In the mid-1990s city, Jane encounters the early days of the Internet while navigating an urban world completely foreign to her sheltered upbringing. Her search for answers forces her to question not only her father's version of events but everything she believed about herself and what matters most in life.
Genres: literary-fiction, coming-of-age, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Montana, Bay Area, San Francisco
Period: 1990s
368 pages · Hardcover · Random House