She planted grapevines to save her marriage. She ended up saving herself instead.
Liz Bergen thought she had everything figured out at nineteen. A handsome husband. A cozy home. A simple, beautiful life. But somewhere between dirty windowsills and midnight silence, the dream she had chosen begins to feel like a cage.
When the couple trades their cramped apartment for a thirty-five-acre farm in New York's Hudson Valley, something unexpected shifts. The soil gets under her fingernails and stays there. A Cornell University experiment introduces French-American hybrid grapevines, and suddenly Liz finds herself tending something that is entirely her own.
But as the vines grow stronger, everything else begins to unravel. Rick's drinking deepens. His absences stretch longer. And Liz is left holding the farm, the children, and the quiet weight of a life she no longer recognizes.
When the truth she has been avoiding finally surfaces, everything comes to a breaking point. Left with the land and two children, Liz does something no one expects. She knocks on her neighbors' doors.
What follows is a story of women learning winemaking the hard way, of friendship forged in cold morning vineyards, and of one woman composting her grief into something golden. Sometimes the most fertile ground is the one you thought was ruined.
Will Liz harvest the life she was always meant to live?
"A novel about vineyard life and family, Linda Rosen's delightful and poignant Sisters of the Vine is for wine-lovers." —Laura Dave, author of Eight Hundred Grapes