Susannah's Garden

Susannah Nelson is fifty, married for many years, a mother and a teacher, and she has begun to regret the roads she did not take. Something in her life feels missing, even though on paper she has little reason to complain.

The year she turned eighteen marked her for good. She said goodbye to her boyfriend, Jake, and never saw him again. Her brother, Doug, died unexpectedly that same year, and she lost him too.

Now her mother, Vivian, has recently been widowed and is struggling to manage alone. Susannah travels home to Colville, Washington, to help, while also dealing with a temperamental twenty-year-old daughter. Back in her parents' house, among her girlhood friends and the garden she has always loved, she is pulled toward the past and the decisions she made there.

This is a contemporary women's fiction story about family, memory and second looks at old choices. The tone is reflective and warm, built around a homecoming and a woman reassessing what she thought she knew about her own history. Some of what she learns turns out to differ from how she remembered it.