Northshire Saratoga: Kim Van Alkemade - Upstate - with Kate Fagan

New York Times bestselling novelist and Northshire bookseller Kim Van Alkemade will celebrate the release of her newest novel, Upstate, an unforgettable story of found family, an abandoned bookstore, healing, and the power of the past to reshape the present. She will discuss the book with fellow novelist Kate Fagan.

Thirty-four-year-old writer Audrey Beacon is grieving alone during lockdown when a post about a bookshop for sale in upstate New York appears in her social media feed like a lifeline. Enthralled by the historic house and the massive barn bursting with books, Audrey impulsively makes an offer. Soon, she’s cashing out her savings, loading her possessions into her dead husband’s van, and fleeing Manhattan for the village of Schuywich, determined to outrun the ghosts of her past.

In 1956, it’s love at first sight when Schuywich librarian Hazel McIntyre meets dashing magazine writer Evelyn Cabot at a summer camp in Maine that discreetly promises a “different vacation for professional women.” By summer’s end, Evelyn has left Greenwich Village to move into an old farmhouse she’s bought in Hazel’s hometown. In her new column, “A Woman’s Place,” Evelyn writes about renovating a house, tending to sheep, and opening a bookshop in her barn with help from the woman readers know only as her “roommate.” Privately, Hazel chronicles their six-decade love story in a series of letters that abruptly end when they’re forced to abandon the bookshop in 2015.

Reopening the bookshop in the summer of 2020 attracts a quirky community of villagers who continuously interrupt Audrey’s solitude: an unemployed Broadway set designer, an ambitious teenage entrepreneur, a storytelling Adirondack grandmother, and Sam Rensselaer, the distractingly handsome representative of the agriculture extension. Past and present begin to converge when Audrey finds “A Woman’s Place” in a stack of old magazines, but it’s the discovery of Hazel’s letters that brings hidden love and long-buried family secrets to light. Will Audrey find the courage to heal the wounds of the past—including her own?

“A beautiful and moving novel about the love we carry for those who leave us suddenly or who slip away little by little. Sharply observed and elegantly woven across two timelines, Upstate is an ode to our shared humanity, the power of stories, and the grace we find in opening our hearts to each other. A breathtaking meditation on grief and healing.” — Marjan Kamali, New York Times bestselling author of The Lion Women of Tehran

Kim Van Alkemade is a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been translated into eleven languages. After a career teaching writing at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, she now works at an independent bookstore in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she lives with her partner, their rescue dog, and two feisty backyard chickens. Upstate is her fourth novel.

Kate Fagan is an Emmy Award–winning journalist and the author of the USA TODAY bestseller The Three Lives of Cate Kay and the #1 New York Times bestseller What Made Maddy Run, a semi-finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. She is also the author of three nonfiction titles, a former professional basketball player, and spent seven years at ESPN.