Rich Soil

When Kate Talbott's husband, Raj, dies suddenly of a heart attack, the life she has so carefully constructed disappears with him. Newly widowed at forty-four, Kate retreats with her eleven-year-old daughter to True Farm, the sprawling Connecticut property that has belonged to her family for generations--and where Raj's ashes now lie buried.

As Kate sorts through the digital remains of her husband's life, she discovers that their seemingly solid marriage held secrets of its own. Meanwhile, the farm pulls her deeper into memories of her complicated parents, her own fraught relationship with food and perfection, and the family history she has spent much of her adulthood trying to escape.

What begins as a summer of mourning becomes an excavation--of a marriage, a family, and ultimately Kate herself. To move forward, she must confront what has been hidden beneath generations of privilege, silence, and carefully maintained appearances and decide what deserves to be carried into the future.

Darkly funny, sensual, psychologically astute, and threaded with the possibility of the unseen, Rich Soil is a novel about the stories families bury, the identities women inherit, and what can finally grow when the truth is allowed into the light.

The manuscript establishes Kate as a newly widowed Manhattan mother retreating to her inherited Connecticut farm after Raj's death, with the estate functioning simultaneously as refuge and repository of family history. The mystery element grows directly from Kate's restoration of her mother's garden, where digging becomes both physical labor and a metaphor for confronting what she has avoided. The manuscript explicitly connects buried truth with the novel's soil imagery: what is suppressed rots, while living things need air and sunlight to grow.