Last Sweet Taste

I seem tough, but Im waiting for the one who can see right through me. I get a little shaky thinking about this possibility, Anna Burke says. After receiving a serious health diagnosis, Anna isnt going to take it lying down. Instead, she sets out in search of something sweet and solid, an undeniable truth she can hold on to as she runs away from her home in the city, landing in a small town in Vermont.

There, Anna meets Noah and Cyrus Wolfe, a father-and-son duo of dynamiters hired to destroy the worst ice dam the town has faced in years. But when the blast goes wrong, neither father nor son can finish the job, and the only person who might be able to save the town is Anna herself.

The Last Sweet Taste is a story of discovering innocence in a difficult world. As Anna searches for truth and comfort, she finds herself among people whose quiet, humble lives offer the sweetness she has been longing for. A resonant story of resilience, unexpected love, and the small triumphs that arrive when everything seems lost, The Last Sweet Taste, as always, is worth the wait.

Nova, a writer of profound attunement to place and psyche, portrays with solemnity and awe a forbidding land and people of reserve and dignity who have little but feel so much. With dynamite and a rogue river signaling lifes precariousness and love as sweetness and agony, this is a galvanizing novel of hardscrabble tenderness.Booklist (starred review)