Hester

Isobel Gamble sails from Edinburgh to Salem, Massachusetts in 1829 with her husband Edward, an apothecary sinking into opium addiction. Days after they land, Edward joins a departing ship as its medic and leaves her behind. She is nearly penniless in a country she barely knows. Isobel takes in sewing to survive, hiding a private gift: she sees letters and words as colors, a sense she keeps to herself.

Her needlework draws the notice of Nathaniel Hathorne, a bookish young man who has not yet added the w to his name or written a page of fiction. He carries the weight of his ancestors' part in the Salem witch trials of 1692. She carries the weight of her own strangeness. Their bond grows even as her marriage and the town's rigid class lines make it impossible.

Around their story, Albanese builds out a Salem of dressmakers and sailors. Freed and fugitive Black residents work an early stop on the Underground Railroad, and women with unusual gifts still watch what they say a century after the witch trials. The novel imagines Isobel as the real woman behind Hester Prynne, resurfacing, transformed, in Hathorne's The Scarlet Letter.

It is historical fiction that takes its time. It sets one woman's account of work, secrecy, and a love she has to give up against a young country still deciding who counts as free.