SHAKER

A cycling trip through a New England valley. A glimpse of white buildings on a hill. A silence that refuses to remain behind.

When Peter and Margaret slow their bicycles to study a cluster of pale, luminous structures set against the darkening hills of New Hampshire, they cannot name what holds their attention. The buildings are not abandoned. They are completed. Something happened here, and the walls remember.

Decades earlier, inside those same walls, a Shaker community enters its final season. Ruth, the woman who keeps the household running, records each day in her ledger: who can still work, who cannot, what knowledge will vanish when the last hands that hold it go still. Elder Thomas reads the morning testimonies and says nothing of what he once witnessed, when voices shook the floor and the spirit moved through the room like fire. Catherine sits by a garden window with empty hands, her sixty years of stitching finished. Eunice tends herbs whose names only she remembers.

Eleven people remain. The bell still rings. The bread is still baked. The floors still remember those who are gone.

SHAKER is a novel about what it means to maintain faith when its source has withdrawn. About the difference between order and devotion. About the knowledge that lives in hands and vanishes with them. About the quiet, terrible beauty of people who keep showing up to do the work after the fire has gone out.

Readers drawn to the quiet power of Marilynne Robinson, Kent Haruf, or Elizabeth Strout will recognize the novel's contemplative, intimate atmosphere. A literary novel set in nineteenth-century New Hampshire, inspired by the Shaker communities of New England.