Excerpt from The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Very clever, she said.

We hadn't talked about him in a long time. He had worked in the little grocery store on the rue de Laiche. He did everything there, but his specialty was fruit, which made sense given his upbringing. It was a sore spot between him and my grandparents that he didn't want to run the orchard when they retired. They had to sell the land to the neighbors instead, and the two orchards were merged. But the Nancys were always kind to me, and when we visited my grandparents, I was still allowed to wander through the cherry trees that used to be ours.

One of the few memories I have of him is from that orchard in the summer. Although the sunshine was splitting hot, under the leaves the air felt lush and languid. My father held my hand as we walked barefoot up the row. I took big steps through the tall grass, squishing overripe cherries between my toes, feeling like a giant in a slow green land. When we reached the orchard's edge, he lifted me onto the stone wall that formed the property line. Before me was a barren vista, a field of wild mustard climbing toward rounded foothills. The sun had gone white in the clouds. What I felt was a kind of thrilling sadness, something I have since experienced when looking out over other open spaces and lonely boundaries: an emotion that lives on the desolate edge of the known.

As important as this memory is to me, the next part contains too much hindsight to be genuine. Still holding my father's hand, I glance back into the trees. They are all the very same height, and through their branches I see the white-walled garage, crouching. The moment has the air of a premonition: instead of a parent, you will have this haunted place. Yet apart from avoiding the garage where he'd done it, I really didn't think of him often. When he left us, I had been too young to understand, and so the disavowal in my essay came easily.

Excerpted from The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard. Copyright © 2024 by Scott Alexander Howard. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.