Lucy Richard has enjoyed a two-decade-long, successful career in public relations in New York City when she feels compelled to move back to rural Massachusetts to try to save her father’s farm. Returning to her childhood home at age 47 is hard enough, but the difficulties multiply once she’s settled in: her determination to raise dairy goats and make cheese is hampered at first by her total inexperience, and then by the sudden loss of her farming mentor. To make matters worse, her husband, Michael, who followed her to the farm reluctantly and who has made a disastrous financial decision, is suddenly in severely declining health.
Lucy finds solace in Sandy, a girlhood companion who quickly becomes more than a friend, but their new intimacy places the Richard farm in the crosshairs of Sandy’s employer, a solar energy company. How Lucy contends with the precariousness–at once financial, physical and emotional– of her new life, and with the competing passions and obligations that grow within and around her, is at the heart of this intimate drama of love and loss, of desire and friendship, and of the alluring possibilities of second acts.
“Jennifer Acker’s splendid new novel Surrender provides what I crave from all stories: vividly drawn characters worth spending time with, a richly rendered place for them to inhabit, and the kinds of impossible choices that the real world too often offers all of us.”
—Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and the North Bath “Fool” novels
“A love story unlike any you’ve read before, Surrender weaves together a mid-life queer awakening, a marriage in which aging becomes a tragic third, and a determined woman’s passion for her farm. The stakes are high at every turn, and I couldn’t stop turning pages to find out how our heroine would survive her surmounting stresses. This immersive novel teems with story and heart, and these characters — both the humans and the goats –felt so real I missed them when I was done reading. Book clubs will love pairing this with a spread of chèvre.”
—Amy Shearn, award-winning author of Animal Instinct
“I loved this glorious and immensely affecting portrait of a farmer’s life, in which her devotion to her partner, community, and land confronts the challenges of commerce and aging. Surrender is a novel with a beating heart.”
—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
“Mirroring the rural New England landscape, Acker creates stark beauty in placing the extremes of life side-by-side: hardship by ease, comfort by pain, destruction by growth, new by old — leaving us with a deeply compelling narrative and a finely etched portrait of a person finding her way. Acker’s astounding clarity and ambition reaches from the complexity of making impossible decisions to the specific hardships and miracles of farming. It’s a timeless book, of timeless struggles and timeless hope.”
—Ben Shattuck, author of The History of Sound
Praise for Surrender
“A bildungsroman of middle age. …Come for the human drama, stay for the goatish antics, or vice versa, in this bighearted tale of paradise forged.”
—Kirkus Reviews