Goode Sisters: A Novel

For fans of Kristin Hannah, this literary novel—set on a working fruit orchard—unspools the secrets of two estranged sisters and a migrant woman as revelations of abuse and an unsolved murder force these women to rewrite their story of family.

It’s summer in the lower Yakima Valley where Kate and her husband, Hayden, are beginning to hire farm workers for the seasonal Bing cherry harvest. Kate, undergoing daily experimental radiation treatment for her newly diagnosed multiple sclerosis, suddenly finds herself struggling to do the ranch work she loves—a love she inherited from her father.

As the migrant families who always come during harvest season return, Dolores Sanchez is among their numbers, returning to the Goode orchard of her childhood with her young family. But Dolores carries a secret that she’s kept even from her husband: Señor Goode, her former boss, fathered Alejo, the teenage boy she calls her cousin. And she is not the only one revisiting her past: Without Kate’s knowledge, her daughter asks Kate’s estranged sister, Olivia, to help with the harvest, and Olivia agrees.

At the height of the harvest, in the aftermath of a near-fatal fire, the secrets of these three women’s pasts explode into the present—revelations of abuse and an unsolved murder that expose the tangled bonds of family, power, and love.