What do you think?
Rate this book
Win a free print copy of this book!
9 days and 22:18:50
40 copies available
U.S. only
The Emilys
Not yet published
Expected 16 Jun 26Win a free print copy of this book!
9 days and 22:18:50
40 copies available
U.S. only
A mother becomes obsessed with finding the cure to a mysterious ailment that is spreading throughout her New England town in this kaleidoscopic novel about love's capacities in a changing world.
“And if we weren’t afraid of the darkness? What world would we make then?”
Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she’s frustrated, bored, and above all, lonely when she runs into Demeter, a childhood friend with whom she shared one transformative summer. Demeter is as beautiful and charismatic as Eve remembers, but she’s also distraught. Demeter’s daughter, like a growing number of others, young and old, cannot go outside during the day. No one knows why, and doctors are skeptical that these people—soon dubbed Emilys, after a famously reclusive local poet—are telling the truth. But Eve believes her friend, whose company revives her and gives her purpose. She will help Demeter—if she can just figure out how.
Eve’s search for answers brings her into the fold of an unlikely band of detectives—the local librarian and the town’s most prolific writer of letters to the editor, who both loved the same woman and now hate each other; an actor hoping to make amends for past mistakes; a hermit botanist whose seed collection might hold a clue if she’d only open her door. They meet in playdates and potlucks, the Elks Lodge and the food co-op, the botanical garden and the riverbank, venturing deep into the town’s past and finding their way towards a future wilder and more wondrous than they had ever expected. But for Eve, this future will require a She is keeping secrets from her husband, fighting with Demeter, distracted from her children. What is she willing to risk to find a cure?
The Emilys is a capacious, profound book about how love of all kinds—love between friends, between mothers and kids, between strangers and neighbors, love for the earth—opens up new possibilities. It How will we learn to live in an altered world? How will we keep each other safe? And when the darkness comes, how will we find joy?
“And if we weren’t afraid of the darkness? What world would we make then?”
Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she’s frustrated, bored, and above all, lonely when she runs into Demeter, a childhood friend with whom she shared one transformative summer. Demeter is as beautiful and charismatic as Eve remembers, but she’s also distraught. Demeter’s daughter, like a growing number of others, young and old, cannot go outside during the day. No one knows why, and doctors are skeptical that these people—soon dubbed Emilys, after a famously reclusive local poet—are telling the truth. But Eve believes her friend, whose company revives her and gives her purpose. She will help Demeter—if she can just figure out how.
Eve’s search for answers brings her into the fold of an unlikely band of detectives—the local librarian and the town’s most prolific writer of letters to the editor, who both loved the same woman and now hate each other; an actor hoping to make amends for past mistakes; a hermit botanist whose seed collection might hold a clue if she’d only open her door. They meet in playdates and potlucks, the Elks Lodge and the food co-op, the botanical garden and the riverbank, venturing deep into the town’s past and finding their way towards a future wilder and more wondrous than they had ever expected. But for Eve, this future will require a She is keeping secrets from her husband, fighting with Demeter, distracted from her children. What is she willing to risk to find a cure?
The Emilys is a capacious, profound book about how love of all kinds—love between friends, between mothers and kids, between strangers and neighbors, love for the earth—opens up new possibilities. It How will we learn to live in an altered world? How will we keep each other safe? And when the darkness comes, how will we find joy?
- GenresFiction
416 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication June 16, 2026
6734 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
A mysterious illness that makes it impossible for the sufferers, called Emilys after the reclusive poet, to go outside in the daytime is at the center of this novel set in Western Massachusetts. Eve lives in Northampton in her childhood home with her two children while her husband pursues a career in music in New York. She is exhausted and at a breaking point when she meets an old friend from her childhood, Demeter, who has come back to town to seek a cure for her daughter who is suffering from the sun sickness. The search for a cure leads them to form unlikely alliances with other affected people and their families. The novel explores the nature of friendship, motherhood, and what one will risk to find a cure for their loved ones. Although this sounds grim, the characters and the community they form, the relationships, and the location, keep it from heaviness. Eve is a woman I will remember for a long time.
February 16, 2026
Perhaps the only thing I dislike about reading ARCs is that I can not quote in my GR reviews—particularly a shame in this case, because there were just so many moments in this book I loved dearly. I will try to capture the essence of this marvelous work without giving away any of the intrigue. The writing was stellar, the plot twists were not the ones I foresaw, and just, overall, I felt a pull to return to this book continuously through the ten days of reading. Abel's writing reminded me of Patchett's Tom Lake and something else I can not quite place, a warm blanket of familiarity, while being, in its content, entirely novel. I enjoyed the way the narrative was structured, with the principal line around Eve and the satellite narratives from other characters.
I would not call myself an environmentalist, although I obviously care about climate change and how it affects species of both plants and insects. The perspective of the ticks was quite unexpected, but I honestly thought it was one of the highlights of the novel. I have been, however, facing a growing urge to abandon all screens, forever, and move to a small village on the coast of the Mediterranean, and do I am not exactly sure what. Just... not this. Perhaps we do drive and type on our screens and keep our lights on a little too much. Would it be so bad to enjoy the nights and the white linens? The simplicity we have lost?
In my life, all roads seem to lead to Emily Dickinson. The timing of this read is kind of odd for me. I have been consumed by an odd sense of nostalgia for this past summer, which I spent in New England, feeling like a bug under a hazy blue glass dome. The title of the work is quite brilliant, I have to say, as I am a lay scholar of all things Emily Dickinson. The insect motifs, the Thoreau connections, the light sensitivity, the love for nature, the mortality, it’s all so closely tied to Dickinson.
I appreciate motherhood as one of the central themes of this novel. An emerging trend, it seems, one I welcome even though I do not plan on having children myself. I see a lot of myself in Eve and her relationship with her mother, more rarely in Persephone and her undying hope, and most often in Kiran and older Sophia in their pursuit to step back into the night. Fatherhood, too, I suppose. Oh, Stephen, the collectivist, but more importantly, the father. What parts of ourselves wouldn't we give for the ones we love?
Also, I fear I am a Demeter hater. Eve can be annoying at times due to her dishonesty, privilege, and jealousy, but Demeter... her character irritated me beyond measure, and yet still propelled my desire to keep reading. I suppose I wanted to see what kind of stupid choices this brilliant woman would make. Actually, now that I think about it, like every character in this book is annoying. Not a bad thing at all. Very human of them. (I am looking at you, Mr. Southwest).
But yeah, basically, highly recommend. I don't even know how to conclude here—go into this with an open mind? Enjoy the Greentime?
Thank you, NetGalley and Penguin Random House, for providing an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
I would not call myself an environmentalist, although I obviously care about climate change and how it affects species of both plants and insects. The perspective of the ticks was quite unexpected, but I honestly thought it was one of the highlights of the novel. I have been, however, facing a growing urge to abandon all screens, forever, and move to a small village on the coast of the Mediterranean, and do I am not exactly sure what. Just... not this. Perhaps we do drive and type on our screens and keep our lights on a little too much. Would it be so bad to enjoy the nights and the white linens? The simplicity we have lost?
In my life, all roads seem to lead to Emily Dickinson. The timing of this read is kind of odd for me. I have been consumed by an odd sense of nostalgia for this past summer, which I spent in New England, feeling like a bug under a hazy blue glass dome. The title of the work is quite brilliant, I have to say, as I am a lay scholar of all things Emily Dickinson. The insect motifs, the Thoreau connections, the light sensitivity, the love for nature, the mortality, it’s all so closely tied to Dickinson.
I appreciate motherhood as one of the central themes of this novel. An emerging trend, it seems, one I welcome even though I do not plan on having children myself. I see a lot of myself in Eve and her relationship with her mother, more rarely in Persephone and her undying hope, and most often in Kiran and older Sophia in their pursuit to step back into the night. Fatherhood, too, I suppose. Oh, Stephen, the collectivist, but more importantly, the father. What parts of ourselves wouldn't we give for the ones we love?
Also, I fear I am a Demeter hater. Eve can be annoying at times due to her dishonesty, privilege, and jealousy, but Demeter... her character irritated me beyond measure, and yet still propelled my desire to keep reading. I suppose I wanted to see what kind of stupid choices this brilliant woman would make. Actually, now that I think about it, like every character in this book is annoying. Not a bad thing at all. Very human of them. (I am looking at you, Mr. Southwest).
But yeah, basically, highly recommend. I don't even know how to conclude here—go into this with an open mind? Enjoy the Greentime?
Thank you, NetGalley and Penguin Random House, for providing an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Some novels tell a story.
The Emilys quietly builds a world around your heart and then asks you what you’re willing to protect when that world begins to change.
From its first pages, this book feels like standing on the edge of something fragile and luminous. Eve is a woman stretched thin by ordinary life—children, distance, exhaustion, loneliness—until the reappearance of Demeter cracks something open inside her. Their reunion doesn’t just bring back memory; it brings urgency, devotion, and a question that won’t let go: What happens when the people we love no longer fit inside the world as it is?
The mysterious illness at the center of this novel is haunting not because it’s spectacular, but because it’s intimate. It isolates. It confines. It reshapes families and friendships from the inside out. Watching Eve step deeper into Demeter’s orbit—believing her when others won’t, standing beside her when systems fail—becomes both beautiful and heartbreaking. You can feel the pull of loyalty growing stronger even as it begins to strain everything else in Eve’s life.
What makes this story so powerful is how it understands love as something both tender and dangerous. Eve loves fiercely, and that love pushes her toward connection, toward discovery, toward community—but also toward secrecy, guilt, and impossible choices. Every step forward costs her something. Every hope carries risk.
The town itself becomes a living presence, filled with unlikely alliances and quiet acts of bravery. Strangers share meals, trade theories, argue, reconcile, and keep showing up for one another. There’s a sense that even in fear, people are reaching outward—toward nature, toward memory, toward one another—in order to survive.
This is a novel about mothers, yes—but also about friendship, grief, devotion, and the radical act of believing someone when the world refuses to. It is tender without being sentimental, hopeful without denying pain. By the final pages, I felt both broken open and gently held, like the book had been whispering something true about how we live now, and how we might learn to live better.
The Emilys is strange, soulful, and quietly unforgettable—a story that lingers like a half-remembered dream and refuses to let go.
Special thanks to NetGalley and Random House for sharing this profound and moving women’s fiction digital reviewer copy with me in exchange for my honest thoughts.
Follow me on medium.com to read my articles about books, movies, streaming series, astrology:
medium blog
instagram
facebook
twitter
The Emilys quietly builds a world around your heart and then asks you what you’re willing to protect when that world begins to change.
From its first pages, this book feels like standing on the edge of something fragile and luminous. Eve is a woman stretched thin by ordinary life—children, distance, exhaustion, loneliness—until the reappearance of Demeter cracks something open inside her. Their reunion doesn’t just bring back memory; it brings urgency, devotion, and a question that won’t let go: What happens when the people we love no longer fit inside the world as it is?
The mysterious illness at the center of this novel is haunting not because it’s spectacular, but because it’s intimate. It isolates. It confines. It reshapes families and friendships from the inside out. Watching Eve step deeper into Demeter’s orbit—believing her when others won’t, standing beside her when systems fail—becomes both beautiful and heartbreaking. You can feel the pull of loyalty growing stronger even as it begins to strain everything else in Eve’s life.
What makes this story so powerful is how it understands love as something both tender and dangerous. Eve loves fiercely, and that love pushes her toward connection, toward discovery, toward community—but also toward secrecy, guilt, and impossible choices. Every step forward costs her something. Every hope carries risk.
The town itself becomes a living presence, filled with unlikely alliances and quiet acts of bravery. Strangers share meals, trade theories, argue, reconcile, and keep showing up for one another. There’s a sense that even in fear, people are reaching outward—toward nature, toward memory, toward one another—in order to survive.
This is a novel about mothers, yes—but also about friendship, grief, devotion, and the radical act of believing someone when the world refuses to. It is tender without being sentimental, hopeful without denying pain. By the final pages, I felt both broken open and gently held, like the book had been whispering something true about how we live now, and how we might learn to live better.
The Emilys is strange, soulful, and quietly unforgettable—a story that lingers like a half-remembered dream and refuses to let go.
Special thanks to NetGalley and Random House for sharing this profound and moving women’s fiction digital reviewer copy with me in exchange for my honest thoughts.
Follow me on medium.com to read my articles about books, movies, streaming series, astrology:
medium blog
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I have mixed feelings about this book. The prose is captivating and evocative, and the story is genuinely intriguing. I was drawn into it almost immediately and found it impossible to put down.
But it eventually got to a point where it felt like the author was trying to incorporate too many themes at once. This isn’t just a story about friendship, marriage, and motherhood, but also the climate crisis, post-viral syndromes, pseudoscience, generational trauma, mental illness, mass hysteria, agoraphobia, environmentalism, and the pharmaceutical industry.
While Eve has a compelling voice, I didn’t feel as connected to some of the other narrative characters, especially Stephen. Demeter’s daughter Persephone is the first “Emily," and I still felt that she was criminally underutilized. I wanted to know more about her mindset as her mother tried to find a cure for her condition. The twist regarding Will’s identity was well done but a little unnecessary, like he belonged in a different story.
There’s an interesting parallel between the mysterious condition affecting the Emilys and the afflicted girls of Salem Village, whose accusations kicked off the infamous witch trials. I would have liked the fear and paranoia of the townspeople to be explored more.
Overall, I think The Emilys would have worked better as a short story collection than a full-length novel. This will sit with me for a while, but I didn't end up enjoying it as much as I thought I would.
But it eventually got to a point where it felt like the author was trying to incorporate too many themes at once. This isn’t just a story about friendship, marriage, and motherhood, but also the climate crisis, post-viral syndromes, pseudoscience, generational trauma, mental illness, mass hysteria, agoraphobia, environmentalism, and the pharmaceutical industry.
While Eve has a compelling voice, I didn’t feel as connected to some of the other narrative characters, especially Stephen. Demeter’s daughter Persephone is the first “Emily," and I still felt that she was criminally underutilized. I wanted to know more about her mindset as her mother tried to find a cure for her condition. The twist regarding Will’s identity was well done but a little unnecessary, like he belonged in a different story.
There’s an interesting parallel between the mysterious condition affecting the Emilys and the afflicted girls of Salem Village, whose accusations kicked off the infamous witch trials. I would have liked the fear and paranoia of the townspeople to be explored more.
Overall, I think The Emilys would have worked better as a short story collection than a full-length novel. This will sit with me for a while, but I didn't end up enjoying it as much as I thought I would.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
The Emilys
By Heather Abel
The Emilys of the title are a group of people in a Massachusetts town who have been struck by a mysterious illness that causes them to become seriously ill if exposed to daylight. In this case, a young girl referred to as Persephone, has this disease. Her mother, Demeter, has little money, but has tried to find a doctor who will acknowledge that her daughter's illness is real.
While in the process of her search for answers, Demeter reconnects with Eve, a childhood friend with two children of her own. Eve agrees to help her friend in her search. From here, we find that there are in fact others suffering from this unexplained disease – and others willing to help the sufferers get answers!
This is a story about love of all kinds: between parent and child; between friends and neighbors; and between people who just want to help.
While I enjoyed the book, I did find that I had to get well into the book before it started to come together.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC.
By Heather Abel
The Emilys of the title are a group of people in a Massachusetts town who have been struck by a mysterious illness that causes them to become seriously ill if exposed to daylight. In this case, a young girl referred to as Persephone, has this disease. Her mother, Demeter, has little money, but has tried to find a doctor who will acknowledge that her daughter's illness is real.
While in the process of her search for answers, Demeter reconnects with Eve, a childhood friend with two children of her own. Eve agrees to help her friend in her search. From here, we find that there are in fact others suffering from this unexplained disease – and others willing to help the sufferers get answers!
This is a story about love of all kinds: between parent and child; between friends and neighbors; and between people who just want to help.
While I enjoyed the book, I did find that I had to get well into the book before it started to come together.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3.5 rounded up
This was a story of love, motherhood, and community above all else. The mystery of the illness and its potential cure was the setting to tell this tale of what it is to love in a climate threatened world, esther than the main driving plot. The pacing wasn’t fully consistent, but the characters were fleshed out and human, their lack of perfection (and frustrating decisions) kept me reading even when I wasn’t always sold on the course of the narrative. The side characters really sold this story, with everyone’s desperation to do the right thing and connect with one another creating an honest source of emotion. This wasn’t perfect, I was frustrated by the reliance on real life locations to create the setting, but it had a lot of heart and the prose was slow and intentional. If you want a unique premise that brings together people searching for a path forward in the wake of the climate crisis, this is worth a try!
Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for this arc in exchange for an honest review.
This was a story of love, motherhood, and community above all else. The mystery of the illness and its potential cure was the setting to tell this tale of what it is to love in a climate threatened world, esther than the main driving plot. The pacing wasn’t fully consistent, but the characters were fleshed out and human, their lack of perfection (and frustrating decisions) kept me reading even when I wasn’t always sold on the course of the narrative. The side characters really sold this story, with everyone’s desperation to do the right thing and connect with one another creating an honest source of emotion. This wasn’t perfect, I was frustrated by the reliance on real life locations to create the setting, but it had a lot of heart and the prose was slow and intentional. If you want a unique premise that brings together people searching for a path forward in the wake of the climate crisis, this is worth a try!
Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for this arc in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
A mysterious illness that prevents people from going outside is the plot line for The Emilys, a tender story about a mother’s search for answers and the people she meets along the way. While the writing is topnotch, the flowery, free-flowing prose was not to my liking, and I had to DNF this one at about 1/3 through the story. This book may be a good choice for book clubs, but the slow pacing and esoteric references, along with the writing style just isn’t for me. I received an ARC of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This was a captivating novel full of wonder and very relevant to our current times. I loved the characters and found Eve fascinating and extremely relatable. I admired the overall theme of love between characters and how the book examines how we adapt to the changes around us and within our own lives. Again, the parallels to the world we live in today made this book fascinating and relatable. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This is a lovely book about Eve, whose daughter hates nature. When she sees her old friend, Demeter she is thrilled but then discovers her daughter can't abide sunlight. As their friendship progresses, we learn about each of them and how we all must navigate the world in our own way in order to find the peace we seek!
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews