Can you trust your own brain? Challenging what we know about our senses, Rapeseed features a synesthetic mom from Kansas with cross-wired colors, smells, and sounds in her letters, her numbers, and her turbulent memories. She's been quietly keeping secrets from and with her husband until his job moves the family to England and rocks their carefully constructed history. The Coopers are displaced by geography, by psychology, and by the subtle tangos of their family: teenaged indiscretions, alcohol, church-going, long-term family feuds, neuroscience, and very worrying new friends. Desperate to untangle the mixed textures of her past while her teenage son confronts a dangerous future, Carolann navigates busy London and winding country roads in search of the one thing promising resolution at home. A funny and painfully true debut novel from a bright new voice in American fiction.

In the summer of 1994, a freak lightning and thunder storm explodes on the southern coast of Maine, killing Nancy Bills’s husband and critically wounding her younger son. She promises her late husband that she will write their family’s story and bind it with a red ribbon of love and courage. In language alternately tender and gritty, The Red Ribbon documents the aftermath of Bills’s husband’s death. As a wife, she grieves and attempts to rebuild her life; as a mother, she strains to be the parent her young adult sons need. Then, one year later, she is faced with more loss—this time, the father whom she adores. After his death, other deaths, some anticipated and others unpredictable, follow. Meanwhile, the impending death of her aging mother is a particular challenge; Nancy struggles to be a good daughter, and on many visits to Montana, her home state, she tries to mend their painful history. Insightful, moving, and full of intelligence and humanity, The Red Ribbon is a story of surviving the many and often devastating lightning strikes of life, and a gift of compassion and wisdom for readers who are struggling with their own losses.