Welcome to Litsy!

Every marriage has its seasons. It’s autumn when we meet Tess, but her marriage to Richard is in a deep, cold winter. A winter so harsh that their union may never see the bright light of spring despite the change of seasons outside the walls of their creaking house. Tess is a Londoner whose relationship with Richard transports her from a Jamaican diaspora in the city to the English countryside where predatory birds hover over fields, buses run twice a day, neighbors barter honey for cider, and no one looks like her. As Tess and Richard settle in, the dramatic arrival of their fraternal twins—one who presents as black and the other as white—recasts the family dynamic, stirring up complicated feelings and questions of belonging. Tess yearns for the comforting chaos of life as it once was, instead of Max and Sonny tracking dirt through the kitchen where cooking Caribbean food becomes her sole comfort. And Richard obsesses over getting his crops planted rather than deal with the conversation he cannot bear to have. In a narrative quartet of unforgettable, alternating perspectives, secrets and vines clamber over the house’s broken red bricks, and although its inhabitants seem to be withering, Sonny knows that something is stirring. . . . As the seasons change and the cracks let in more light, the family might just be able to start to heal.