Upstate

by Kim van Alkemade

A grieving writer. An abandoned bookshop. A secret love story hidden in letters.
From New York Times bestselling author Kim van Alkemade comes an unforgettable novel about found family, healing, and the power of the past to reshape the present.

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, “A Woman’s Place,” 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 “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?

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Books About Books, Lesbian, Literary Fiction, Adult, Queer

416 pages, Paperback

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

[Mariel]

Upstate 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. Upstate speaks directly to the kind of connection and community we need more of right now.

[Suzanne Leopold (Suzy Approved Book Reviews) · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Our lives are little more than an infinite series of random collisions. We need narrative to corral the shapeless stream of chance into a navigable river.”
This one pulled me in quickly with dual timelines. This novel has one timeline set up as letters and a magazine column which uniquely connects the characters with historical fiction events weaved into it. I don’t read a lot of books with a Covid setting but I found it reflective ,and it worked for this book. It is about grief, family dynamics and relationships.Heartfet tears were shed when I finished this one,

[Jennie Kirby · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book lover’s dream story! This novel follows Audrey, a writer and English professor after she loses her husband to Covid and has to start her life over with no family left. She buys an abandoned bookstore in upstate NY with zero experience and quickly falls in love with its rich history and eclectic strangers who show up with various ties to the property. She uncovers a sweet love story between the previous owners through letters and articles and we get a glimpse into their past as the novel weaves dual timelines between the three women. I enjoyed the diverse characters, historical and current political references and lessons in the novel. A satisfying cozy read.
Video review here: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTyL7QHRc/

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently the Bookstore Came With Sheep, Letters, Family Secrets, and an Ethics Problem
Kim van Alkemade’s “Upstate” packages a warm reinvention story around a much sharper question about what happens when somebody else’s private life becomes your material
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | October 6th, 2026

Don’t start with a phone call. That is the rule Audrey Beacon used to give her creative-writing students when they insisted on writing grief: before the call that changes everything, establish what can be lost. Then “Upstate” opens with the call telling Audrey that her thirty-three-year-old husband, David, has died of COVID. Her rule does not merely fail; experience makes it look faintly impertinent. “Who am I to dictate how your story unfolds?” she thinks, because the phone call is not only where this story starts. At first, it is all she has. Kim van Alkemade keeps returning Audrey to versions of that embarrassment. She is a woman who knows how stories work and discovers, repeatedly, that knowing how stories work is not the same as knowing what happened.

Even the premise seems to offer a recognizable route out. Widowed at thirty-four and trapped in a Manhattan apartment during lockdown, Audrey impulsively buys Red Barn Books, a used-book shop housed in a barn in the fictional upstate village of Schuywich. The purchase comes with a rambling farmhouse, a hundred acres, neglected stock, conservation obligations, and enough picturesque impracticality to make common sense file a forwarding address. Audrey tells the realtor that owning a bookstore has always been her dream. It has not. What she wants is a life so unlike the one David occupied that grief might have trouble recognizing her in it. The bookstore is less a dream than camouflage.

Much of the novel’s warmth comes from watching that attempted disappearance become crowded. Wren, an unemployed Broadway set designer with old ties to the shop, helps repair the buildings; teenage entrepreneur Aisha makes herself indispensable; her grandmother Lulu brings local history; Sandra offers bodywork and another vocabulary for healing; sheep arrive with no respect for narrative economy; Sam Rensselaer, the agricultural-extension representative checking Audrey’s property boundaries, introduces the unnerving possibility that attraction has survived widowhood. A few of these figures remain more useful than fully dimensional, as though Schuywich has been stocked with exactly the specialists Audrey’s reconstruction requires. But their collective function is better than cure. They keep requiring her presence: feed this animal, open this door, answer this person, stay alive long enough that somebody notices when you are missing.

Elsewhere in the house, another woman’s life has already been made legible for strangers. Audrey finds old issues of “Mademoiselle” containing “A Woman’s Place,” a column by Evelyn Cabot, who bought the farmhouse in 1956, repaired it, raised animals, and eventually opened the barn as a bookstore. Evelyn’s opening provocation is crisp: if a woman’s place is in the home, why should she wait for Prince Charming to provide the property? Her editors balk at “a single woman buying and renovating her own house.” “Single” turns out to be an extraordinarily efficient word. It is accurate enough to print and inaccurate enough to organize decades of misunderstanding.

That word starts changing as soon as Hazel McIntyre begins to write. Interleaved with Audrey’s contemporary account are Evelyn’s public columns and letters written decades later by Hazel, the local librarian whom those columns reduce to a lodger, roommate, or useful companion. Hazel remembers meeting Evelyn at Camp Kokatosi, a discreet vacation spot for professional women, falling in love, and wondering whether Evelyn was asking her to become a “roommate or your partner.” Two nouns, separated by an “or,” carry more historical pressure than a paragraph of explanation could. “Roommate” can pass through a magazine column, a family dinner, a property transaction. “Partner” changes the room in which it is spoken.

Read the three women for whom they imagine on the other side of the sentence. Evelyn writes for strangers. Her prose has to charm, persuade, make competence look inviting, and protect the premise that keeps the column publishable. Hazel writes to one person, the woman she has loved for decades, just as dementia begins taking their shared past out of circulation. She can say what Evelyn could not put in “Mademoiselle,” yet there is something sadder than simple candor in the letters. Hazel keeps explaining Evelyn’s own life back to her. Details that would be exposition in another historical novel become small acts of retrieval: do you remember this, do you remember us, can I put this day back where you might find it?

If Evelyn’s account were simply fraudulent, Hazel’s would have little to do beyond correcting it. But Evelyn did buy the house. She did climb onto roofs, learn husbandry, improvise a rural life, and build a business. A woman reading “A Woman’s Place” could reasonably have seen in her an enlarged idea of what a woman might attempt. Hazel does not expose those accomplishments as counterfeit. She restores the company Evelyn kept while performing them. The escaped-sheep episode, for instance, first survives as an amusing test of Evelyn’s rural resourcefulness; Hazel’s version puts back the people, loyalties, and quiet accommodations that made the anecdote possible. The event stays put. Its center of gravity moves.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates that better than Evelyn’s final column in 1983. “The truth is, I’ve always had someone by my side,” she admits, before calling Red Barn Books “a joint venture from the beginning.” Then the prose begins retreating from what it has admitted. Hazel is the “village librarian,” the woman who rented a room, the “constant companion,” the “librarian lodger.” The syntax opens the door and the nouns stop at the threshold. Evelyn can relinquish the glamorous fiction of having done everything herself. She still cannot put the love affair into the magazine’s vocabulary. There is no sudden revelation that the old column was false. It becomes painful because we can hear exactly how much truth Evelyn has managed to squeeze through without saying the one thing that would rearrange all the rest.

Audrey makes an apt reader for those evasions because she is professionally trained to notice construction and personally gifted at missing what construction conceals. A memoirist and former writing teacher, she thinks in point of view, scenes, beginnings, endings, and metaphor. Her narration often travels the same route: a physical object catches her attention, association opens memory, memory gets interpreted. Van Alkemade’s prose is clearest and best when that movement feels nearly involuntary. It is less remarkable for syntactic fireworks than for how easily it moves between the ordinary and the loaded: a book, a kitchen wall, a sheep, a wedding ring. Audrey’s problem is that she seldom lets the loaded object remain unexplained.

Particularly revealing is the compartment uncovered during renovation. Inside are Hazel’s letters to Evelyn. Audrey pauses over privacy for roughly the amount of time required to formulate a joke: “writers are by nature cannibals of other people’s stories.” Assuming both women are dead, she arranges their correspondence by date and reads an intimate life in an afternoon. Her tears are real. So is the trespass. What she discovers deserves preservation; that does not mean it was offered to her. The scene is better for refusing to make curiosity automatically noble, especially because Audrey herself is a memoirist. Other people’s lives are her subject matter before they are anybody’s lesson.

Afterward, van Alkemade does occasionally clean up after her own effect. Audrey chastises herself for accepting Evelyn’s confident persona, recalls that an English major should distrust unreliable narrators, and lists the people she ought to have questioned harder. Everything she says is defensible. Most of it has already happened to us as readers. Hazel’s letters have changed the preceding chapters without assistance, and Audrey’s explanation narrows an experience that was briefly more unstable. This is the novel’s most consistent weakness: a scene or object earns an inference, then Audrey arrives half a beat later to name it. I kept wanting the book to leave a few more things unattended.

Darker images benefit from being left alone. A swarm of bees first appears almost suspiciously ready to signify migration, collective life, a new queen, another beginning. Then a neighbor sprays the hive. Audrey finds the bodies beneath the tree, brittle wings crumbling in her hands, and grief flips into fury. Later she presses stingers from the dead bees into the palm Sam had held. A symbol the reader might have filed under rebirth comes back carrying poison. Nothing about the earlier image has been erased; it has simply become impossible to use innocently. That is exactly the kind of revision the novel is built to perform.

In winter, the same pressure reaches Audrey’s cherished fantasy of self-sufficiency. She has made herself so unreachable during a storm that nobody knows she is home. The survival novels she loved as a child, full of stranded children triumphantly living off the land, suddenly look ridiculous to a freezing adult in an isolated house. Neighbors eventually rescue her from hypothermia. The point arrives through the body before Audrey has language for it. Self-reliance is no longer freedom when you have edited every witness from the scene and there is no one left to know whether you survived the night.

More quietly, Hazel’s papers change Audrey’s relation to papers she has refused for years. Audrey’s mother died by suicide when Audrey was a child, and an abandoned memoir about that death has left her with a sealed police investigation report. An editor once urged her to reconstruct her mother’s perspective; Audrey objected that she did not know enough to claim it. Hazel and Evelyn make that old objection newly uncomfortable. Audrey can remember her childhood accurately and still possess only a child’s portion of what happened. When she finally approaches other evidence, the movement is less from ignorance to truth than from one defensible account toward a less solitary one.

Importantly, Hazel’s letters do not become scripture just because they were never meant for publication. Her estrangement from her brother Billy, his marriage to Mai, the McIntyre inheritance, and the prejudices that hardened family conflict into decades of silence acquire different contours once Sam enters the story. Hazel has remembered those years from inside her own injury and regret. Billy had another position; Mai another; their descendants inherit only pieces. A private letter may permit honesty that a magazine column cannot, but intimacy does not grant omniscience. Hazel gives Audrey more to know, including reasons to distrust how little she knew before.

That leaves the novel with a productive problem. Hazel writes because Evelyn is forgetting. Evelyn’s imperfect columns really did give women an example of life outside the expected one. Audrey’s tendency to make stories can trap her inside punitive interpretations, yet the answer is not to stop telling stories and sit amid shapeless experience. She has to alter the story when more life arrives. “Upstate” believes deeply in narration, perhaps too deeply ever to become harsh about it. People survive here by arranging what happened into something they can carry. What they carry is never everything.

Rather uncannily, the real history behind Red Barn Books repeats part of that pattern. Owl Pen Books in Washington County says its founder, Barbara Probst, left Manhattan and an editorial job at “Mademoiselle,” moved into an old rural farmhouse, taught herself to renovate it, raised chickens and sheep, and opened a bookstore in a farm building. Van Alkemade writes in her acknowledgments that a 2021 Book Riot listing led her and her partner to the property; they visited, learned about Probst and her “longtime companion” Jean Slocum, made an accepted offer, and were heartbroken when the contract fell through. The lost purchase became the inspiration for “Upstate.” The resemblance is almost mischievous: van Alkemade encountered a vivid public account of a woman and a bookstore, then made a novel out of wondering what any vivid public account necessarily leaves unavailable.

One boundary is essential. Owl Pen Books’ documented history does not establish that Probst and Slocum lived Evelyn and Hazel’s fictional romance. Van Alkemade’s acknowledgments call Slocum Probst’s “longtime companion,” but fiction is doing the imaginative work here, not exposing a hidden fact. To confuse those categories would reproduce Audrey’s own temptation: a few suggestive pieces line up, and suddenly the satisfying explanation begins pretending to be evidence. The gap is not proof. It is where fiction starts asking what public memory cannot tell us.

Precisely dated history makes Hazel’s June 26, 2015 letter especially painful. That was the day the Supreme Court decided “Obergefell v. Hodges,” holding that states must license marriages between two people of the same sex and recognize lawful same-sex marriages from other states. Hazel and Evelyn listen to the news together, but Evelyn’s dementia has progressed far enough that she soon asks again whether they can marry. Hazel later gathers the power of attorney and health-care proxy that had given their relationship legal force before marriage could, insisting that they have been “wedded” since Evelyn first drove upstate for her. A right can arrive for the country on Friday morning and still reach one household decades late.

Of all Audrey’s mistakes, the most consequential is assuming Hazel belongs entirely to the past. She and Sam enter the McIntyre house expecting history and meet an old woman who sees Billy in Sam’s face. That morning Hazel had been a packet of letters whose author could not object to being read. By evening she can ask where Audrey found them. Suddenly the archive has a pulse. More awkwardly, it has preferences. The reversal works because it changes less what happened than Audrey’s relationship to what happened: the woman she had been treating as recoverable material turns out to retain the inconvenient powers of the living.

Ultimately, van Alkemade gives Audrey a gentler reckoning with that inconvenience than she might have. Hazel does not recoil from her. She had helped choose Audrey as the buyer, recognizes a fellow widow, enters the community around the restored bookstore, and eventually participates in the larger story Audrey begins to write. Her willingness matters, but it cannot travel backward and make the first reading consensual. Nor does the novel seem eager to punish Audrey for reading. It leaves an uneasier possibility between those positions: perhaps preserving another person’s history and taking something from that person can happen in the same act.

Late repairs accumulate quickly enough that I could sometimes feel the novelist tidying the room. The right house contains the right letters; Sam belongs to the right family; Hazel survives long enough to meet him; an old estrangement begins to loosen; Red Barn Books thrives; Evelyn’s pseudonymous lesbian pulp novels acquire a queer literary afterlife; Audrey reconnects with family and begins writing again. Some members of the Schuywich ensemble feel similarly calibrated to her needs. Yet one obvious piece is left deliberately untidy. Sam is not handed to Audrey as proof that grief has been successfully completed. He remains possible rather than promised. David does not have to be demoted for another love story to become imaginable.

On its own terms, “Upstate” earns 87/100 and 4/5 Goodreads stars. Its strongest work happens in the distance between forms: Evelyn’s increasingly strained euphemisms, Hazel explaining shared memories to the woman losing them, Audrey’s unopened police report, a secret compartment full of somebody else’s words. Its chief weakness is almost comically appropriate to its subject: it sometimes mistrusts incompleteness and rushes to supply the missing interpretation. The Epilogue makes a better corrective. After Audrey has spent most of the novel reading Hazel, Hazel gets the final pages and writes once more to Evelyn. Audrey, at last, is somebody inside another woman’s account.

So is David’s ring. Audrey has worn the Claddagh as marriage, guilt, memory, and accusation. Near the end she slips it onto Hazel’s finger, briefly lending a widow who never had a wedding ring the object that once marked Audrey’s legally recognized marriage. Later Audrey asks for it back but does not put it on. She hides it with one of David’s Valentine cards in the same compartment that once held Hazel’s letters. Hazel imagines some future inhabitant finding the heart between two hands, one reaching toward the past and the other toward the future, and inventing an explanation. That person will not know David, or the hospital sidewalk, or why Hazel once wore the ring, or why Audrey finally wanted it hidden instead of displayed. Perhaps the card will have deteriorated. The gold probably will not. What survives will invite another story, and another story will leave something out. The ring will still be real.

[Rebekah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upstate is a dual timeline novel, primarily following 34-year-old writer and English Professor Audrey Beacon during the early days of the Covid pandemic in 2020 as she grieves the sudden and traumatic death of her husband David. One day, while isolated in NYC during the covid lockdown period, she sees a listing for a historic house and barn in Shuywich, under a trust requiring her to re-open the bookstore in the barn. She cashes in her savings and retirement plan and flees the city for the upstate rural town and quickly realizes that owning a bookstore and historic home will require a little help from her neighbors and other town residents. Interspersed throughout the book are letters written by Hazel McIntyre and magazine articles by Evelyn Cabot, the two women who lived in the house prior to Audrey purchasing the property. Evelyn and Hazel presented themselves as roommates to the world, but as we slowly learn from Hazel's letters, this is a love story spanning from the 1950s to 2015.
Upstate is a book about family, both genetic and found, and how grief can shape who we are and how we connect with others. Audrey is both grieving the death of her husband, but the loss of her mother when she was 10 and the death of her father when she was a young woman. She struggles to make connections with those who live in Shuywich, who are helping her setup her bookstore and it's not until a near death experience forces her to realize that even those who may view the world differently than her, they are still there to help her. The examination of grief and the process by which Audrey slowly heals and moves on with the help of the other townspeople was well done, and the character growth and development was especially satisfying.
Thank you to William Morrow and NetGalley for the electronic ARC of this novel for review.

[Maeve Robinson · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me a copy of Upstate in exchange for an honest review. This was a delightfully charming novel. I love that it was loosely based off experiences of the author as well! I enjoyed the interconnectedness of the past and present and appreciated how the narratives perfectly interwove by the end. I will say I preferred reading more about Evelyn and Hazel's love story more than Audrey, but I understand that without Aubrey's perspective, this novel wouldn't have realized its full potential. My only critiques of the novel are that it still feels quite fresh to be writing about the pandemic. I often turn to reading as a form of escapism, and having to be thrust back into 2020/2021 lessened my enjoyment of Audrey's narrative at times. Also, while I agreed with all the political statements made in the book, I often felt that the novel was quite preachy at times. Perhaps those messages will make their way to a more conservative reader, but I truthfully think the vast majority of this novel's audience is liberal and queer like myself. Beyond that though, this was a quick and enjoyable read, and I'd gladly recommend this to readers when it officially publishes in October.

[Jenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Thank you for William Morrow for the eARC via Netgalley. All opinions are my own*

When I came across the book, it was the title and the blurb that caught my attention. I was also familiar with the publisher, William Morrow; I’ve read a lot of works from that publishing company. However, it was my first book by Kim van Alkemade , so I wasn’t sure what I would think of the story. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was going to like this book, but it wasn’t until a few chapters in that I realized that I was going to fall in love with this story. I fell in love with the story and the characters. When the story picked up the pace, I knew that I was in trouble, and once I reached the end, I had to think about it all. What a beautiful story.

It didn’t take me long to get lost in Aubrey, Hazel, and Evelyn’s stories. I liked the way that Kim wrote about the women individually but also interconnected their stories. Aubrey, Evelyn and Hazel were all such strong women; even if they didn’t realize it at the time. This isn’t a love story, but a story about love, family, strength, and starting over. At some point I got so invested in the story that I didn’t even realize how much time had passed. Of course, I liked that it was told from dual timeline. Even though I enjoyed all the perspective, I loved reading Hazel’s letters to Evelyn the most. It didn’t take long to see how much Hazel loved Evelyn. The letters were filled with so much love and emotion that I found myself feeling them when I was reading them.

I liked the way everyone made Aubrey feel welcome and tried to help her in any way they could. I can’t even begin to imagine making such a drastic change in my life. From the beginning of the book, Aubrey grew in so many ways, and although she was still healing, she changed as well. I think getting that bookstore is just what she needed. I’m so glad that I got a chance to read this book. I would highly recommend checking this book out.

[Erika · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Loss and grief; hiding part of yourself and the weight of secrets; courage, redemption, and forgiveness, for others and especially for yourself; the power of stories to heal us; and incredibly fierce, brave, inspiring women.

The universe dropped this in my lap in the exact moment I needed it, and I will forever be grateful for these endearing characters that will live with me for a long time to come

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC of this novel. During the COVID crisis, reeling from a lifetime of grief, Audrey Beacon decides to buy a homestead in upstate New York, which includes a bookstore that has been shuttered for many years. The property is held in trust, and the seller stipulated that the buyer must reopen the bookstore. From here, the stories of the current and prior owners of the property are told from two timelines and three perspectives, with overlapping characters. The stories are about the traumas we all carry and how they can keep us away from those who want to help us.

[Dive Into A Good Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book swept me up in its arms and had me at hello. COVID is still a hard topic for me to read about. It takes me back to a time of uncertainty, the fear of the unknown, and thousands of people dying. Not being able to go out into public, see your friends or family, all came tumbling back to me. This book begins in NYC, a place you do not want to be when a pandemic hits. So many people, not able to get out and about, and you are confined to such small spaces. Where do these people go when they are hit with this new way of life? They move out to the country, throw their lives into homesteading, or being able to work remote. This book shows how one woman moves to upstate New York to get away from the sadness that NYC now triggers. The characters she meets are just that characters. They are funny, will do anything for anyone no matter what your political view or stance. Will you have arguments yes, but if you need help, they will be the first to drop everything and run to you.

Audrey Beacon is an English Professor in New York City. She has an Irish husband who plays a mean violin in a band. They have heard mummering's about COVID. Yet he still goes to a gig and comes down with it. As the days pass, the worse David becomes. So bad that Audrey must drop him off on a sidewalk in front of the hospital. Waiting days to hear if he improved. When a call finally comes in it is to tell her he has passed. Audrey is hit with a sledgehammer. How is this right? How can he be gone? The walls are closing in, and she needs an escape when she stumbles across an ad for Red Barn Books. Not only are they selling the house, but a bookshop as well. It feels like an invisible string is tugging her north. As soon as she steps foot outside her van she already knows she wants it. But it comes with a stipulation. The bookshop must be kept running. She needs this place; she feels it in her bones. As soon as it is hers the neighbors start to come out. At a trickle, since it is COVID. Meeting outside, with masks, 6' apart, but Audrey makes it happen.

My eyes were filling with tears at certain points. I love that it was told through multiple points of view, through letters and a column. Two loves Evelyn and Hazel were the owners of the bookshop first. Yet their entire relationship had to be kept low key, since it was 1956. No one really knew, except the two of them. They were together for decades and Evelyn had dementia at the end. Hazel wrote her letters to try to bring back memories. All three of these powerful women made it through trying times. This is a book worth reading. Thank you to Kim van Alkemade, and William Morrow for my gifted copy.

[Deborah Payne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upstate
By: Kim Van Alkemade

Publish Date: October 27, 2026

Publisher: William Morrow/William Morrow Paperbacks

General Fiction (Adult)/LGBTQIA+/Women's Fiction

#Upstate#NetGalley





I would like to thank both William Morrow and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this book. All opinions are my own.

Book Review:

I enjoyed this book and gave it 4 stars. It was an easy read and went fairly quick.

This book starts out as the pandemic starts and there are some triggers so beware of those. The warners are death of parent and spouse and suicide. This book is told in a dual time in my opinion. The dual part is through magazine articles and letters.

In the current timeline a young woman is dealing with loss of her spouse and isn't sure what she truly wants to do. One day she sees an ad for the sale of a home and bookstore. The catch is the new owner has to start up the bookstore again before the trust fund will allow the purchase.

In the past timeline you have a young librarian and a magazine writer who meet at a camp for lesbians. They become interested in each other at the camp and continue with the relationship afterwards. The librarian is going to move to New York to be with her new friend, but her brother isn't doing well at home, and she needs to be there for him. The writer decides that she will make the move instead and there is a home not far from the librarian and decides to buy it and do articles on how she fixes it up. This is told through her articles and the letters that the librarians write

The new widow decides to buy the house and bookstore with cash to start a new life. The book talks about her struggles with her loss and how to make the home and store work for her. She struggles but is able to make new friends along the way and they help her.

I like how the author writes and it makes you feel like you are there for all the struggles in both timelines. I like the friendships and relationships also. I would recommend this book.

[Kristin Kurek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Upstate by Kim van Alkemade is one of those rare books that fortifies the soul and lingers long after the final page.

In 2020, Audrey is grieving the loss of her husband to COVID-19. Trapped in lockdown in her New York City apartment, she feels claustrophobic, isolated, and overwhelmed by grief. On impulse, she makes an offer on a historic property upstate that includes a bookshop housed in a barn, turning her life upside down in the process.

As Audrey works to reopen the bookshop, she uncovers the story of its founder, Evelyn Cabot. Through a magazine series Evelyn wrote called A Woman's Place, Audrey learns about the bookshop's origins and development. She also discovers sixty years' worth of letters chronicling the life-changing romance between Evelyn and the town librarian, Hazel McIntyre.

As Audrey uncovers the past, she sets out to right old wrongs while slowly healing her own broken heart.

“I hear the rusty squeal of the barn door rolling open. I smell the intoxicating scent of foxed paper. I feel my fingers brush dust from embossed leather covers. I imagine the hoard of words amassed like the treasure of a slumbering dragon, waiting for my sad eyes to bring them back to life.”

This book is exquisitely written. The reading experience felt immersive and deeply rewarding, as though the words simply washed over me. I was devastated alongside Audrey when she lost her husband, and it felt as though I moved through the grieving process with her. As she purchased the bookshop and farm, I shared her trepidation, hope, and excitement. And as the whirlwind romance between Hazel and Evelyn unfolded, I found myself falling in love right alongside them.

Watching Audrey risk everything to build a new life after loss was profoundly moving. As she healed, it felt as though something within me healed, too. Upstate is a beautiful story about grief, love, second chances, and the transformative power of books. It's a novel that will stay with me for a very long time.

[Chelsea · Rating 4 out of 5]

*NetGalley ARC*

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, especially Evelyn and Hazel’s story, which to me was the main story. The history involved and the compassion in those characters and the absolutely insane things they all had to go through. It was my favorite parts to read.

It deals with the pandemic in such an interesting way, but in a way that I do think is going to be familiar to most people. The overarching theme seems to be grief, how each character has theirs and deals with it in their own way.

While I think Audrey’s story was important, I don’t think I needed her side of the story to be as long. I think it meandered too much for me, and her marriage that she was so devastated by sounded like a sham, with a horrible proposal that was basically for a green card and a husband who didn’t help financially in any way and insinuated that he had groupies on the road. But that was only brought up once and then she NEVER acknowledges those things again. And she’s also kind of a judgmental prick, she’s a total snob who thinks she’s better than everyone else and hides it behind being extremely passive aggressive (though I do think she’s starting to grow out of this a little by the end).

I am just being a little nitpicky with some things that stood out and irritated me, I loved a lot of things about Audrey, she’s wasn’t afraid to go after what she wanted, even though the purchase of the bookstore was impulsive she made it work, she was good at fixing it up herself and took the credit for it. She really reminded me a lot of Evelyn and Hazel both, which I wonder if the ‘daughter I never had’ is meant to reference.

Overall I HIGHLY recommend picking this up, I will definitely be getting a physical copy when it comes out!

[Anjali · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars, rounded up. I think I'm an outlier on this book, and that's at least in part my own fault - I saw the description about a woman buying a bookstore, and I completely glossed over the fact that the present-day timeline was set in the first year of the COVID pandemic. Audrey's husband dies of COVID in NYC at the start of the novel, and in her grief she ends up buying a historic house in upstate New York that comes with a huge amount of acreage and a massive barn full of books to sell. Every other chapter, we get the secret sapphic history of the bookshop through Evelyn's magazine columns and her partner Hazel's letters reminiscing about their lives and relationship. I was very uninterested in the COVID aspect of this novel, but I did enjoy Audrey's journey to build the business and fix up the house through her grief process. Where this fell flat for me: I felt no connection when Audrey lost her husband; I felt like I was told how much she loved him, but all the information I received about him from the start made me wonder why the heck she was with him. I enjoyed Evelyn and Hazel's relationship, but the use of Hazel's letters felt clunky to me, though the juxtaposition with Evelyn's columns was skillfully executed. None of the characters really came to life for me, and I ended up feeling irritated with Audrey a little too frequently. I really enjoyed van Alkemade's afterword, and I will definitely consider checking out whatever she writes next. Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for a digital review copy.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one was SO good! I loved the story itself, but the local connections made it extra special for me.

Upstate weaves together a present-day storyline with the past, revealed through letters and magazine articles. As the layers unfold, complicated family dynamics, forbidden relationships, grief, and suicide become part of a story about the secrets and pain we carry and the power of storytelling to bring the past into focus and heal our broken pieces.

What made this especially fun for me was recognizing the real-life inspiration behind the fictional world. As I started reading, I realized this was taking place just a little north of me. I had to stop and research. The author draws on experiences from her own life, and the fictional town was a combination of two actual towns in the area. Even Red Barn Books, a bookstore featured in the story, is based on Owl Pen Books, which is already on my list for my bookstore road trip series!

And now I get to attend the book launch at Northshire Books in Saratoga Springs, another bookstore on my road trip list. Talk about a reader’s dream!

I loved how the three timelines and their stories ultimately came together. Upstate is a layered read with heart, history, and a strong sense of place. The local connections made it even more meaningful, and I can’t wait to celebrate this book with the author at the launch.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was eleven years old we took a trip across the country to see family in upstate New York. The trip was memorable—my family lived on a hobby farm in the country, in an old farmhouse. I loved seeing buildings and communities and hearing their stories (this is where the Olympics were in the 1980s…this is where the Von Trap family lived after the fled Europe…this was used as a stop in the underground railroad…etc.). Van Alkemade’s book does a remarkable job looking deeper at the stories of the people and places around us. We meet Audrey in March of 2020, at the height of Covid in NYC, as her husband is dying on a ventilator. In the midst of her grief, Audrey flees the city for an irresistible offer—to buy a farm upstate, complete with a bookstore in the barn. The only catch? She must become a bookseller. Over the course of the next year, we peel away the layers of both Audrey’s story and that of the farm she has come to inhabit. The writing was exquisite, and the story reminded me a lot of Rosamunde Pilcher—maybe the themes of community, or the way disparate stories and people weave themselves together? At any rate, I flew through this book and was so sad to come to the end. This will be on my best of the year, for sure. Thank you to William Morrow and Netgalley for an advanced reader’s copy. Upstate publishes on October 27.

[liv · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.25⭐

Upstate is a dual-timeline historical fiction with sweet sapphic longing (lesbian FMC!) and the aching message that it's never too late to begin again.

I really loved how the past was intertwined with the present through the letters and we kind had the characters having much of the same feelings at the same time, it made for such a rich experience.

I found the first 20% a bit slow but I absolutely loved how Alkemade described the world around Hazel and Audrey, the setting was alive under her hands just as much as the characters were and I wish I could visit the barn bookstore for myself, that's how good it made me feel.

Ultimately, it was a story about grief, forgiving yourself and the other, finding peace and solace in community and knowing you can begin again, as long as you're breathing there will be a second chance to right a wrong. The tale of these women and their struggles was told beautifully and deserves the time you're willing to give it.

And last but definitely not least, please, read the Acknowledgments, the story will become that more special if you do.

Thank you to Netgalley and William Morrow for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

[Kate Belt · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s about a newly widowed woman who buys and renovates a house & bookstore in Upstate NY during Covid. You’ll find deep character development. and strong sense of place in space and time. The bookstore is important, but the character’s lived experience in a small rural community is more important, and I believe could be representative of small towns anywhere. This is literary fiction, not a cozy romance, bookstore novel! There are two timelines, one from when a lesbian couple occupied the property in the 1950s, told in letters, and the other during the Covid epidemic period in the 2020s. The author weaves in multiple themes of racism, sexism, agism, grief, community, relationships, and getting along even with people you vehemently disagree with. I highly recommend this book. Main characters from both time periods have a strong point of view about the historical time in which they are living, just trying to get along as progressive women in a conservative community, and finding their tribe. I heard about this book on the What Should I Read Next podcast, requested & received a NetGalley ebook ARC! For readers of Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett, Lily King, and Joyce Maynard.

[Judy Tiemeyer · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Historical fiction at its best! This story has it all - interesting historical time period, character growth in the current timeline and engaging characters!
In the current timeline, Audrey has just lost her husband to COVID in March 2020 in NYC. She decides impulsively to buy a defunct bookstore housed in a barn in upstate New York. There she discovers the story of the two women who lived in the house previously and she deals with her own grief in losing both her parents and her husband, both while building a new network of friends who become her family.

The plot is interspersed with fictional articles from "Mademoiselle" magazine from the 1950's and onward that one of the women wrote as well as letters that her partner wrote to her of their history. The historical timeline was so captivating! I also enjoyed all the people that Audrey met in this little town upstate and how they all helped in their own ways to heal her. Audrey's struggles with grief and mental health were realistic and her journey to healing was heartwarming. Such a beautiful story!

Thank you to Netgalley and William Morrow for this ARC. All opinions are my own.

[Lori · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for an advanced copy of Upstate.

📱📖 Upstate is a dual timeline story that follows two women who move from NYC to upstate New York to build a life around a piece of property that includes a unique bookshop, farm animals and land in a rural community. Hazel's story spans six decades starting in the 1950's; Audrey's story takes place during and after the COVID pandemic. The characters were written with a depth that had me feeling invested in their lives from the beginning. I really enjoyed the cozy upstate farming community vibes and the cast of characters in the community across both timelines. The way the community ultimately looks out for each other was heartwarming. The parallels in Hazel and Audrey's stories were smartly written and I loved how they came together. I did feel like the story got bogged down and a little slow in the middle, but the last third of the book really came to life and ultimately had a very satisfying ending. I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy dual timeline stories with strong female characters and a cozy rural setting.

[Dana Matte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to LibroFM for the ALC!

I am so disappointed! This book had all the makings of a 5 star book. It was heartfelt and the story kept things interesting. The author is a really good writer. But the use of politics took me out of the story repeatedly just because of the frequency of use. I understand social issues were a mechanism to connect the various stories. I get that. But it was just overused in my opinion. The way it was written also made caricatures of both the conservative and liberal characters. Very few people are 100% of either thing. Real life is more nuanced. I recall the main character stated early on in the book that her father had taught her to judge people individually by their behavior and how they treated people and not by any group to which they belonged. Then she truned right around and did the opposite. If I am being totally honest, this has become an issue in so much of the literature being published currently. It is so tiresome and I am ready for someone with a different take. Unfortunately, this otherwise charming book with a great storyline was ruined by identity politics and is not the one.

[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.

[Jordan Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Upstate by Kim van Alkemade
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

Release Date: October 27, 2026

Thank you William Morrow and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an eARC of Upstate by Kim van Alkemade. Upstate follows the stories of 3 women in different time periods as they all become intertwined with each other.

Upstate was a sad, yet heartwarming story about grief, forgiveness, and love. The ending had me in tears at 1:30 in the morning because I couldn’t put this down. The three different POVs were wonderfully done. There was never one I favored over the other which I find happens sometimes in multi POV books. I loved the way Audrey, Hazel, and Evelyn’s stories become intertwined in the end. The cast of characters is fantastic. I loved the side characters and those that come to help Audrey after she purchases the bookstore. I am always up for a book with quirky, small town characters and people who love books.

I really love reading historical fiction books about books, which is what initially drew me to read this story. I loved the way historical events, like the Vietnam War, were woven into the story. I really appreciated that most of the historical aspect of the story was based more in the experiences of everyday people, like Hazel and Evelyn, and what their lives were like. This is also the first book I have read that is set during the pandemic. It’s crazy that the pandemic was long enough ago that there are books set during it now. I really enjoyed Audrey’s character arc of dealing with her grief and overcoming her guilt over her husband’s death.

Overall, if you love character driven books about books with a quirky cast of characters and a heartwarming love story then you will definitely enjoy Upstate. Also, make sure that you read the acknowledgments at the end of the story. They definitely make it more meaningful!

[John G · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this novel, Kim Van Alkemade shows us that bookshops need not only be cozy, carefree, or romanticized, but rather that they can also serve as environments for fostering community, processing grief, and coming to terms with oneself. Van Alkemade's prose succeeds in emotionally dropping the reader into the ups and downs of recently widowed and spontaneously relocated Audrey Beacon's life, past and present. The emotional weight and seriousness of Audrey's journey towards newfound purpose and healing is bolstered by the legacy of the bookshop's former caretakers, Evelyn Cabot and Hazel McIntyre, who's own bravely storied lives serve as stepping stones for Audrey's new one. Further, it is clear from her acknowledgments that Van Alkemade poured much of her own passion and experience into this novel, making it that much more heartfelt, bold, and enjoyable. Thank you, Kim, for crafting this awe-inspiring story to share with the world!

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This dual narrative focuses on a bookstore in rural upstate New York, alternating between the original owners starting in the 1950's and the current owner during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. I liked how van Alkemade told the historical narrative through interspersed letters and magazine columns. While some of the secondary characters were not fully developed, the main characters in both narratives were interesting and relatable. A heartfelt and compelling read that will certainly appeal to readers who love books about bookstores. To be published in October, I received an eARC from Edelweiss.

P.S. For those who are wondering, the Jewish content is negligible and insignificant. I found the one reference to Gaza gratuitous and unnecessary, and another reference to "Talmudic law" odd (and perhaps incorrect).

[Ghosting · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for letting me read this early


This was a textbook “not for me” read. I wasn’t expecting this to be so sad, and while the book might be good for you, I had a big issue.

Okay so I live in the state of NY, where this book takes place, and I’ve been to a few of the towns mentioned in the book. It really bothered me that instead of choosing a town for the bookstore to be in, the author mushed two town names together to make the town fictional. That really bothered me because why are all of the other towns and places accurate? Like it feels really weird to me and it took away so much from my reading experience. Maybe I’m just weird like that I don’t know. But if you’re not from NY or don’t know the towns mentioned in the book maybe you’ll like it more than I do

[booksbydorothea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely recommend

I received a complimentary copy of this book. The opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Please note that the 2020 timeline discusses COVID-19 in NYC, which was a little triggering for me.

This novel has too much going on! It has two timelines (one is epistolary) and a magazine article. It is set in the same fictional town in upstate New York in both 1956 and 2020. Both timelines have too many characters, and some even overlap.

The writing is good, the character development is okay, and the plotline is a lot.

If you like books with LGBT+ characters, dual timelines, or good writing, then this is the book for you.

For a more detailed review, check out my blog - booksbydorothea: https://tinyurl.com/4hkyfe3k

[Beth · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishers for access to a digital reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 stars, rounded to 5 stars. I loved 90% of this book. I found the three distinct voices (Audrey through daily life in 2020-2021, Evelyn through magazine articles in 1956-1983, and Hazel in letters written in 2015) a truly delightful way to get to know the characters in these story lines. I binge-read a good chunk of the book, I was so invested in how the author would work every thing out. I was, however, a bit disappointed in the ending. It felt much more predictable than I was expecting from the rest of the novel. Did I still enjoy the plot immensely? Undoubtedly! Would I still recommend it? Absolutely!

[Lucy Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this moving novel, which interweaves the stories of three women connected across time by a bookstore in a small upstate New York town. Audrey, reeling from grief after losing her husband during the pandemic, impulsively buys an old bookstore housed in a barn. But the bookstore has a fascinating history, and the stories of its two previous owners, Hazel and Evelyn, unfold through letters and magazine features. There's romance, history, and a deep love of books here, alongside a meaningful exploration of grief and the complexities of love and relationships.

[Eleanor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel gives a new perspective to all of us on our lives during COVID-19, and a reflection on our past selves. Kim van Alkemade writes about hard and dark subjects, giving them fresh eyes and a lens of thoughtful beauty. I don't tend to read historical fiction but I highly enjoyed reading the interconnected stories of these characters in depth. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for an amazing and inspiring new read!