Digital audio narrated by Sarah Mollo-Christensen

A young widow is trying to recover from her own trauma by working in a remote state park deep in Pennsylvania’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Kathleen is fine, she insists, and happy to be left alone. But when a stranger with a heavy accent comes into the store/lodge where she works flipping burgers she is intrigued. He says he’s a student from Uzbekistan, but he’s clearly unprepared for the winter conditions in the park. To Kathleen, Daniil seems shell-shocked, almost terrified, clearly hiding from someone or something.

This is a tightly written, marvelous psychological / political thriller. The characters are skittish, guarded, and yet reveal themselves by their actions. Kathleen and Daniil recognize in one another a certain similarity – both are running from the truth, both profess to need solitude even a way to hide away, and yet both want desperately to confide and reveal their pain and their hopes. They both crave and fear connection. It’s difficult to believe that either of them will ever achieve happiness; their pasts are just too traumatic.

This short novel includes some major issues: domestic abuse, drug addiction, military and political intrigue / espionage. The landscape is practically a character, and adds to the feeling of isolation, loneliness and imminent danger. The reader is kept in suspense to the very end.

Sarah Mollo-Christensen does a marvelous job of narrating the audiobook. I particularly liked the way she voiced Daniil and Martin. ( )

Kathleen runs a small country store attached to a hostel in the remote Pennsylvania hills. She has obviously suffered some type of trauma in the past from which she has not yet recovered. One day a man she first thinks seems to be a Russian checks into the hostel, and it soon becomes apparent that he is hiding from something or someone. Nevertheless he and Kathleen begin to develop a relationship.
This book seems to be trying to be a psychological thriller, or perhaps even a spy thriller, and it is trying to present the reader with serious issues of moral ambiguity. It fails. It does not have the depth of detail to create an entirely believable situation. It is all rather simplistic.
I did like to read about Kathleen's dysfunctional family, her abusive ex-husband, and the down-and-out community in which she lives. As a domestic drama, the book could have been okay; as a political thriller, a failure. ( )

I think this had potential, but somehow tried to tell too many stories. Kathleen is a single woman who has been in a terrible car accident. She runs a store near a remote state park. It's getting winter so very few customers. Across the way is a hostel, also barely staying open in the winter. A stranger appears with a foreign accent. He and Kathleen spend time together and he tells her he is from Uzbekistan and has left the country because he has done terrible things mainly "betraying" people.

Kathleen is living with an aged grandmother and is apparently from a pretty dysfunctional family. She has a story, the stranger has a story, her story comes apparently in the second half of the book unveiling her marriage to a cruel man who later dies in the auto accident.

I think the author was trying to tell a story about being kind to those that deserve no kindness. "Do unto the least of these...." but I'm not sure that goal is accomplished. There is a lot of mental angst and self-questioning. Disappointing. ( )

Kathleen works as the sole employee of a small convenience store in a national park in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. She's effectively hiding out; living in her hometown but spending all of her time at the store, which is frequented only by hikers and hunters, or at home, where she lives with her grandmother. Occasionally, her best friend can get her out for a few hours, but she insists she's content, recovering from the accident that took her husband's life. At the tail end of the season, when even the hunters are becoming scarce, a man shows up at the hostel next to the store. He's from Uzbekistan and clearly hiding from someone.

This is a difficult book to describe. It's almost a thriller, but more of a character study and exploration of culpability and our responsibilities to each other, combined with a vividly described setting. The author has used her background to write a very well put together story that touches on the political situation in Uzbekistan and domestic violence. ( )

A humane and—in spite of some intense violence—gentle novel that explores the growing friendship between a young widow and a refugee from Uzbekistan, each side of the relationship framed by the the punishing load of secrets they both carry, all set against the winter landscape of rural Pennsylvania. But aside from its very deliberate thriller-like pacing as those secrets slowly unfurl, the book is more substantially concerned with exploring themes of guilt, forgiveness, loneliness, concealment, and the large and small ways people harm each other. This is one of those books that prove the point that reading fiction can make you a more compassionate person—it grapples with some hard issues of personal culpability and doesn't return pat answers.

The writing here is low-key, appropriately atmospheric, and for the most part well done, though foreshadowing is some dicey business and needs to be done with a lighter touch. But overall the novel was moral in an un-preachy fashion that I appreciate in fiction, and St. Vincent kept it honest enough to keep me engaged. ( )