Exclusive Excerpt from UPSTATE by Kim van Alkemade:
One bleak morning, a post pops up in which a friend has shared a link to an article in an online literary magazine. There’s a gorgeous photograph of an old barn sporting a weathered sign that reads red barn books. Beneath it, my friend has commented:
Can you believe this? A hundred acres upstate is cheaper than a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment!
I click on the article. Have you ever wanted to own a bookshop in a barn? the title reads. Now’s your chance! It tells the story of a woman named Evelyn Cabot who started a business selling used books out of a barn on the farm she bought back in the 1950s. The bookstore closed five years ago, it says, when Evelyn went into a nursing home. She passed away over the winter and the bookstore is now for sale. The article has a link to a real estate listing. Desperate for a few more moments of distraction, I follow it.
I’m not taken to Zillow or Redfin or any of the other slick sites. Rather, I land on the clunky webpage of a small-town real estate agency. The commercial listing for “Red Barn Bookshop on Ridgetop Road in Schuywich, New York” contains a series of photographs of a simple nineteenth-century Greek Revival farmhouse surrounded by fields and woodlands with a sunrise view of blue hills across a misty valley. There are dimly lit images of a big barn filled with shelves of books. Mesmerized, I scroll through the pictures on a loop—house, field, woods, hills, barn, books—until the images seem like photographic evidence of a fantasy world, as if a roll of film has been smuggled back from Narnia.
“Enough,” I say, shutting my laptop. Instead of catching virtual glimpses of the outside world, what I ought to do is get out of this tomb of an apartment. I lace up my sneakers and walk to Central Park, entering through the Artists’ Gate. It’s cooler today than it was on campus a month ago, the air fresh and the squirrels frisky. Picnickers are scattered across the Sheep Meadow, their blankets spaced six feet apart. Along the Mall, pedestrians give one another a wide berth as cherry blossoms swirl like out-of-season snowflakes. My stiff knees ache as I roam the looping paths of the Ramble. Crossing the Oak Bridge, I rest against the railing and gaze at the lake’s still waters. It’s a pretty scene, but Olmsted’s illusion of nature is shattered by downtown skyscrapers that serrate the horizon.
What the hell am I doing here? I wonder. Not here in the park but in this city. It seems like all the people I know have fled to Hudson Valley cabins or family farmsteads in Vermont. If my dad were still alive, he’d have welcomed me home to Kenosha, where I could sit on the bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan, miles of blue water melting into a distant horizon. But the house I grew up in belongs to someone else now, my inheritance nothing more than numbers in a bank account.
“What the hell am I doing here?” This time I say it out loud. I never intended to make Manhattan my home. The job that brought me here was temporary, at first, a lecturer position meant to last a year, two at most. The only reason I applied for the tenure-track position was to appease David. My husband was a Dubliner, a New Yorker, a city boy through and through who couldn’t imagine living anywhere else in America. But I grew up under the prairie skies of Wisconsin, loved the years I spent among Iowa’s endless fields, missed hiking the Sierra Nevada’s wild canyons. I could have compromised on a fixer-upper in one of those artsy towns along the Hudson, but David flat-out refused to consider moving north of Inwood Hill Park. “If I wanted to live in the middle of nowhere,” he’d say, dramatically exaggerating the distance to Tarrytown or Irvington, “I’d have stayed home and taken over the sheep farm as my da wanted me to.”
My husband is no longer here to help me see the magic in Manhattan. The city where we met is the epicenter of the pandemic that killed him. The four walls of the apartment we called home have become a solitary confinement. Trapped within them, all I see are the empty places where David ought to be, constant reminders that I’ll never again feel his touch or smell his scent or hear the scrape of his key in the lock. Instead, I’m left to dread the day when a box containing his ashes will be delivered to my door. [...]
Back home on my couch with a glass of gin, I pull up the property listing for Red Barn Books. I envision myself walking across that wide lawn between the house and the barn, strides longer and arms spread wider than is possible in my tiny, tragic apartment. 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. Or maybe it’s the other way around, I think. Maybe there’s a story in that barn full of books that will teach me how to live again.
From UPSTATE by Kim van Alkemade. Used with the permission of the publisher, William Morrow. Copyright © 2026 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 solitude: 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?
Women's Fiction Historical [ William Morrow Paperbacks, On Sale: October 27, 2026, Paperback / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9780063438033 / eISBN: 9780063438040 ]
Kim van Alkemade is a New York Times bestselling author of four novels whose work has been translated into eleven languages. She was born in New York City, spent her childhood in New Jersey, and attended college in Wisconsin, where she studied English and History at UW-Parkside and earned a doctorate in English from UW-Milwaukee. After a career teaching writing at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, she relocated to Saratoga Springs, New York, where she works at a local independent bookstore. She makes her home with her partner, their rescue dog, and a feisty backyard chicken.
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