Upstate: A Novel – A Sapphic Love Story of Grief, Healing, and Hidden Letters in Upstate New York

by Kim van Alkemade

From New York Times bestselling author Kim van Alkemade comes a story of love, loss, and healing that speaks to our present moment while richly evoking the past. A grieving writer who sets out to revive an abandoned bookshop in upstate New York discovers forgotten letters that reveal the shop’s secret sapphic history.

Thirty-four-year-old writer Audrey Beacon is grieving alone during lockdown when a post about a bookshop for sale in upstate New York pops into 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, “The Upstate Dispatch,” Evelyn writes about her adventures 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 An unemployed Broadway set designer. An ambitious teenage entrepreneur. A story-telling Adirondack grandmother. Then there’s Sam Rensselaer, the distractingly handsome representative of the agriculture extension. Past and present begin to converge when Audrey finds “The Upstate Dispatch” 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?

Kindle Edition

Expected publication October 27, 2026

About the author

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 upstate New York where she lives with her partner, their rescue dog, and two feisty backyard chickens.

Reviews

[Natalie Jenner · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE UPSTATE DISPATCH is a heartfelt and heartening tale of community set in a bucolic barn and bookstore in upstate New York during a harrowing time in recent history. Audrey Beacon, a grief-stricken writer and teacher, leaves Manhattan for the quaint village of Schuywich and decides on a whim to purchase and revive Red Barn Books. Her adventures as a brand-new homesteader and bookshop owner are complemented throughout the novel by a series of wonderfully charming Mademoiselle magazine articles written by previous owner Evelyn Cabot, who decades ago took on huge risks of her own. Author Kim van Alkemade surrounds these enterprising heroines with an array of caring and down-to-earth characters, and one of the many great joys of the novel is unearthing their decades of shared secrets and unexpected bonds. Brimming with richly detailed emotion and prose, THE UPSTATE DISPATCH offers a poignant, inspiring and triumphant example for everyone who has dreamed of an escape to the country and the chance to restore connection, both to the past and to each other.

[Genevieve Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Upstate Dispatch, Kim van Alkemade tells a layered, deeply human story about the ties that bind us—between partners, across generations, and within the communities that carry us when life breaks open. It’s a novel that stays with you, a reminder that even in our hardest moments, we are not alone.

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Upstate Dispatch quietly broke me open in the best way. It's a beautiful and tender reminder that grief doesn’t have to be endured alone - that connection, even when it arrives unexpectedly and when we resist it, can be the very thing that heals and saves us. Through Evelyn, Hazel, and Audrey we see that living a full life means taking risks and listening to what calls your heart. The Upstate Dispatch speaks directly to the kind of connection and community we need more of right now.