Sign-In
Cart
Asa James
Paperback
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: Dec 16 2025
Pages: 306
Weight: 0.91
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Winner of the 2025 American Legacy Book Awards: Historical Fiction
Winner of the 2025 Feathered Quill Book Awards: Historical Fiction
A heartfelt debut, beautifully told.-Jennifer Klepper, USA Today bestselling author of The Last Road Trip
1875 Vermont. Asa James hasn't exactly sucked on the silver spoon. No one chooses to grow up on a rural poor farm, but a mixed-race orphan with Asa's scarred face has little choice.
Determined to be a naturalist and scientific thinker in the vein of Charles Darwin, instead he finds himself thrust alone into the wider world, taking a tutor's position at a mountaintop mansion. There, the widow Caro Rockwell is glossy and sardonic, someone so far outside Asa's experience that she could well be another species. But soon he glimpses the broken woman inside the shell. Amid a series of eerie events, they form a friendship that grows into a sweet and tender sort of love.
His heart has what it wants. But then, from within the many dark recesses of Mansfield Hall, a shameful secret is discovered that will force Asa into making a terrible choice.
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Agee, Joel
Musil, Robert
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paperback