THE YEAR BEFORE

Annis Flood has spent thirty years being the most articulate person in every room. She can locate the precise emotional register of any text, identify the exact word a student is reaching for, diagnose the specific wound underneath a piece of writing in forty seconds. She is very good at this.

She is less good at her daughter.

When Imogen stops returning her calls, Annis does what she has always done: she looks for the thing she said wrong. She makes a list. The list is organized.

Then a novel unfolds — one chapter, one year, moving backward through thirty years of a mother and daughter. The phone calls that were always fine. The advice that was never asked for. The birthday visit that cut short by a day. The beach where Annis opened her book while Imogen was still talking. The year Annis’s grief took the room and Imogen, fourteen years old, learned to stop needing her.

Before Annis can understand what she is looking for — there’s the Christmas kitchen where she completed her daughter’s sentence before Imogen could finish it, a hospital window with Noel and Imogen easy in the garden below and Annis’s hand on the glass, the landing door she paused at and chose not to knock on, her husband redirecting a conversation she didn’t know needed redirecting, the tide pool on the Maine coast where Noel sat down and said show me with his whole attention, and the delivery room in 1994 where Annis held her daughter for the first time and felt, alongside the enormous want of it, a fear she could not account for.

She has spent thirty years performing understanding in place of having it. Imogen has spent thirty years adjusting. This is not a story about a villain. It is a story about the specific distance between loving someone and letting them feel loved.

Contemporary upmarket women’s fiction told in reverse chronology — one chapter, one year, backward through thirty years of a family. The kind of book you finish in one sitting and then sit with for days, trying to decide whose side you were on.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Fiction > Literary Fiction > Family Life sits at 5.8 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 55–80 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — mother-daughter estrangement is the highest-performing emotional territory in this category

→ The reverse-chronology structural conceit is immediately legible and endlessly discussable — the premise is repeatable in one sentence, generating the organic word-of-mouth that drives sustained sales in this lane

→ Dual-category positioning in Fiction > Women’s Fiction > Domestic Life (5.2 sales-to-comp, Hot Mainstream) gives strong presence in two high-volume categories simultaneously

→ Book club selection potential is exceptional — the central question (does understanding someone’s history change what they owed you?) has no clean answer, sustaining the kind of divided, passionate discussion that drives repeat selection and gifting

→ Standalone format aligns with reader preference — upmarket WF readers actively prefer one-and-done emotional reads; the complete arc within one volume reduces purchase hesitation and increases impulse conversion

→ Print sales will outperform ebook — subject matter, literary weight, and gifting potential (mothers to daughters, daughters to mothers) all favour physical copy in this lane

Themes:
· Mother-daughter estrangement
· The accumulation of small failures
· Understanding vs. forgiveness
· What is inherited, what is chosen
· The distance between loving someone and letting them feel loved

Perfect for fans of: Elizabeth Strout, Lionel Shriver, Ann Tyler, and Celeste Ng