The Slow Green Things - Hardcover

When Mara Calloway receives a phone call on a Tuesday morning in late April, she is twenty-four years old, four months into grief, and running out of reasons to stay in the city. Her grandmother has died. She has left her a building.

In Harlow, Vermont, the building is a plant and garden store that smells of soil and something she has never been able to name - a smell that returns her, briefly and completely, to a version of herself she believed was gone. Next door is an attorney named Glenn Ashby, fifty-five, who has been rebuilding his own life in Harlow for four years and who has been waiting, without quite knowing it, for exactly this.

The Slow Green Things is a novel about grief and recovery, about the slow honest work of choosing to stay - in a place, in a life, in a relationship. It is about a grandmother who arranged everything three moves ahead and trusted the rest to the people she chose. It is about what it means to pay attention, and about what becomes possible when you finally do.

Tender, precise, and quietly devastating, this is a love story for readers who understand that the most significant things always grow slowly, and always in the dark.