The worst has already happened. This story is about everything that happens next.
In Millbridge, Illinois, a river town with no spare people, three strangers are each carrying the end of a life.
Tom Nowak, fifty-seven, listened to machines for twenty-eight years, until the plant closed and the quiet moved in. Vivian Hale ran her husband's firm for three decades, until he kept the firm and let her go. Maria Brennan held her family together through her husband's long illness, and has not cried since the morning he died.
Then a pottery studio in a 140-year-old mill posts a flyer: Adult beginners welcome. Get muddy.
Over one year, September to September, their lives braid together through a dying kiln, a farmers market, a bowl nobody wanted, and a town that refuses to let anyone fall alone. None of them will arrive anywhere. Every one of them will begin.
Nothing gets replaced. The table just gets longer.
A heartwarming, feel-good novel of grief and healing, friendship and second chances, for readers who love gentle small town fiction where kindness does the heavy lifting.
From the author of The Second Life comes a story about what grief builds when nobody is looking: not recovery, but becoming. The Year After stands fully on its own; no prior reading is needed.