The Upstate Dispatch

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Thirty-four-year-old writer Audrey Beacon is grieving alone during lockdown when a post about a bookshop for sale in upstate New York pops into her social media feed like a lifeline. Enthralled by the historic house and the massive barn bursting with books, Audrey impulsively makes an offer. Soon, she’s cashing out her savings, loading her possessions into her dead husband’s van, and fleeing Manhattan for the village of Schuywich, determined to outrun the ghosts of her past.

In 1956, it’s love at first sight when Schuywich librarian Hazel McIntyre meets dashing magazine writer Evelyn Cabot at a summer camp in Maine that discreetly promises a “different vacation for professional women.” By summer’s end, Evelyn has left Greenwich Village to move into an old farmhouse she’s bought in Hazel’s hometown. In her new column, “The Upstate Dispatch,” Evelyn writes about her adventures renovating a house, tending to sheep, and opening a bookshop in her barn with help from the woman readers know only as her “roommate.” Privately, Hazel chronicles their six-decade love story in a series of letters that abruptly end when they’re forced to abandon the bookshop in 2015.

Reopening the bookshop in the summer of 2020 attracts a quirky community of villagers who continuously interrupt Audrey’s solitude: An unemployed Broadway set designer. An ambitious teenage entrepreneur. A story-telling Adirondack grandmother. Then there’s Sam Rensselaer, the distractingly handsome representative of the agriculture extension. Past and present begin to converge when Audrey finds “The Upstate Dispatch” in a stack of old magazines, but it’s the discovery of Hazel’s letters that brings hidden love and long-buried family secrets to light. Will Audrey find the courage to heal the wounds of the past—including her own?

Praise

"In The Upstate Dispatch, expert storyteller Kim van Alkemade deftly weaves together the voices of three extraordinary women, each looking for love, meaning, and a way to make their shattered families whole again. This page-turner has it all: starting over in midlife, sapphic longing, a dreamy bookstore - even a flock of sheep. I couldn't put it down, and cried more than once! By turns tender and unflinching, The Upstate Dispatch is the kind of novel you can wholeheartedly recommend to every reader you know."

— Amy Shearn, author of Animal Instinct

"In The Upstate Dispatch, Kim van Alkemade tells a layered, deeply human story about the ties that bind us—between partners, across generations, and within the communities that carry us when life breaks open. It’s a novel that stays with you, a reminder that even in our hardest moments, we are not alone."

- Geneveive Graham, bestselling author of The Chambermaid's Key

"A big-hearted tapestry of a novel about three women whose lives intersect at a bookstore in upstate New York. Starting in the 1950s, when one woman falling in love with another could have dangerous ramifications, and moving into the time of COVID, when you could lose your loved one over the course of a weekend, this is a profoundly moving story about grief, healing, love, caretaking, entrepreneurship, sheep, bees and, most of all, the joy of the community of the bookstore. You cannot read this novel and not want to hug your local bookstore owner. Or perhaps open a bookstore yourself."

- Susan Breen, author of Merry