The Orchard

A Novel

By: Peter Heller

Narrated by: Kate Marcin

Peter Heller’s masterful coming-of-age tale, the story of a mother and daughter living on a Vermont apple orchard, escaping ghosts of the past.

Hayley and her seven-year-old daughter, Frith, live in a rustic cabin with no electricity in the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains. A renowned translator of Tang dynasty poetry, Hayley walked away from her career and her addict husband to raise Frith alone in a land populated not by ambition-fueled academics but by hawks, beavers, and other wild things—including their exuberant Bernese Mountain dog, Bear. They get by on what little they earn from their overgrown apple orchard and the syrup they make from their maple trees. Frith— precocious, homeschooled, and a voracious reader—considers herself queen of this backwoods paradise. She is too young to understand the pain and regret that have followed her mother here.

Season after season, it is the three of them—mother, daughter, and dog—until the spring day when Rose Lattimore appears at their door and upends Hayley and Frith’s solitary existence. When tragedy unexpectedly strikes, Frith must come to terms with heartbreak for the very first time. By turns joyful and searing, The Orchard reminds us that, even during the hardest of times, the enduring power of nature, love, and friendship will prevail.

Critic reviews

"Heller is a master in writing about wild places, about the hawks and the beavers and the changing of the seasons. Reading The Orchard is an escape into a world of beauty and love and friendship—and the unexpected challenges of life."
—Denver Post

"This gentle, moving story is an elegy to the narrator’s mother and her mom's rural Vermont childhood and beautiful Chinese poetry translations. The voice Heller creates is so real, you’ll keep forgetting it’s not a memoir, and the lovely 'ancient poetry'—all Heller’s own—is masterful.
—Marion Winik, People

"Contemplative and emotionally layered....Ideal for readers who love Liz Strout, Claire Keegan, or intimate, place-driven fiction. I finished it feeling hushed, like I’d walked through someone else’s memory and needed a moment to just sit with it."
—Victoria Wood, Bibliolifestyle

“This discreet monument of American literature reaches its point of incandescence.”
—Le Point (France)

"[A] moving novel....Where [The Orchard] excels is in evoking a sense of revisiting the past and noticing the things that both were and were not said....The novel is nominally intimate in scope, featuring only a handful of characters, but it also reckons with big ideas and impossible questions. A powerful look at interpersonal bonds, familial and otherwise."
—Kirkus (starred review)

"Heller brings the setting to life with lyrical prose and delivers an emotionally charged, heart-wrenching conclusion. Readers are in for a treat.”
—Publishers Weekly

Quickly reeled me in

At first I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this. But I’ve enjoyed so many other books by the author that I stuck with it. In no time I was all-in and couldn’t stop listening. Beautiful story celebrating women and the strength of finding your path.