A charged, delightfully offbeat novel of four women forging their way across time, place, and language in search of desire, power, and connection.One day they were in love and the next, a manuscript appeared in his study, written in a language she didn’t speak.Leonie and Max are on separate but tangled paths. Now, she might be pregnant. And he’s not answering her texts, off translating poetry from a language he seems barely to know.Ana, the...

The history of New Orleans is one of contrasts--heroes and villains, catastrophe and celebration, sinners and saints. In this New Orleans, a serial-killing axeman threatens to murder anyone not playing jazz. A fearless band of missionary nuns pushes to civilize the frontier. During World War II, Nazi U-boats lurk off the coast, while Denton Crocker's battle with local mosquitoes contributes to victory in the Pacific. From the streetcar strikers who lined the thoroughfares with IEDs to the ...

NEW YORK TIMES BEST HISTORICAL FICTION OF 2020"Only Katy Simpson Smith could have written a novel of such elegance, emotional power, and grace. The Everlasting, a quadruple love story spanning two millennia, is no less than the story of love itself—its frustrations and thrills, its blunders and transcendent glories. Meraviglioso."—Nathaniel Rich, author of King ZenoFrom a supremely talented author...

From the author of the highly acclaimed The Story of Land and Sea comes a captivating novel, set in the late eighteenth-century American South, that follows a singular group of companions—an escaped slave, a white orphan, and a Creek Indian—who are being tracked down for murder.In 1788, three men converge in the southern woods of what is now Alabama. Cat, an emotionally scarred white man from South Carolina, is on the run after abandoning his home. Bob is a talkative black...

Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, this incandescent debut novel follows three generations of family—fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave, characters who yearn for redemption amidst a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery, and love.Drawn to the ocean, ten-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father’s stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she n...

A Best Book of the Year at The New YorkerA Must Read at The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, The Millions, and Garden & Gun“[A] lyrical incisive novel . . . [about] a changing climate, the invisibility of women’s work, and the perseverance of unofficial histories.” —The New YorkerIn Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds

White, black, and Native American women in the early South often viewed motherhood as a composite of roles, ranging from teacher and nurse to farmer and politician. Within a multicultural landscape, mothers drew advice and consolation from female networks, broader intellec-tual currents, and an understanding of their own multifaceted identities to devise their own standards for child rearing. In this way, by con-structing, interpreting, and defending their roles as parents, women in the So...

One day they were in love and the next, a manuscript appeared in his study, written in a language she didn't speak.Leonie and Max are on separate but tangled paths. Now, she might be pregnant. And he's not answering her texts, off on some questionable assignment translating poetry from a language he seems barely to know.As Ana moves through the disintegrating island house her father filled with his paintings, the house where her mother struggled to survive...

A Mississippi woman pushes through the ruin of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. She has escaped her life, apprenticed herself to catalog all the species growing in this place. Crawling along the stones, she wonders how she has landed here, a reluctant botanist amid a snarl of tourists in comfortable sandals. She hunts for a scientific agenda and a direction of her own. In 1854, a woman pushes through the jungle of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. As punishment for her m...

Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, this incandescent debut novel follows three generations of family—fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave, characters who yearn for redemption amidst a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery, and love.Drawn to the ocean, ten-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father’s stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she n...

""Only Katy Simpson Smith could have written a novel of such elegance, emotional power, and grace. The Everlasting, a quadruple love story spanning two millennia, is no less than the story of love itself—its frustrations and thrills, its blunders and transcendent glories. Meraviglioso.""—Nathaniel Rich, author of King ZenoFrom a supremely talented author comes this brilliant and inventive novel, set in Rome in four differe...

From the author of the highly acclaimed The Story of Land and Sea comes a captivating novel, set in the late eighteenth-century American South, that follows a singular group of companions—an escaped slave, a white orphan, and a Creek Indian—who are being tracked down for murder.In 1788, three men converge in the southern woods of what is now Alabama. Cat, an emotionally scarred white man from South Carolina, is on the run after abandoning his home. Bob is a talkative black...