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The Cider House on Wildflower Ridge
(2026)(The first book in the Second Life series)
A novel by Cynthia Luhrs
A grieving widow.
A forgotten orchard.
A family secret buried for thirty years.
Two years after her husband’s sudden death, fifty-six-year-old Emerson Haven has perfected the art of staying busy enough not to think too hard about what comes next. Then the company she gave twenty-two years to replaces her with a younger woman and sends Emerson home with her career packed into a cardboard box.
With no job, no plan, and no desire to spend the rest of her life proving she’s still useful, Emerson does something wildly out of character. She sells her Manhattan apartment and buys an abandoned apple orchard in upstate New York without ever seeing it in person.
Wildflower Ridge is not the peaceful refuge the photographs promised. The farmhouse is unsafe, the barn is listing to one side, hundreds of apple trees have gone wild, and Emerson’s new home is a mouse-scented vintage Airstream named Dolores. Before long, she’s also acquired Walden, a wary stray dog who seems to have chosen her, Daisy, a young wanderer who can repair almost anything, neighbors who refuse to let her disappear into solitude, and Greg, a quiet beekeeper who understands that grief doesn’t need to be fixed before life can begin again.
As summer turns toward harvest, Emerson slowly begins restoring the orchard and discovers a journal hidden inside the old cider house wall, written by a woman who once loved and lost on the same land. Addie’s words teach Emerson something she never expected to learn, that sometimes survival isn’t about moving on. Sometimes it’s about staying long enough to see what grows.
Then, two years after his death, Emerson finally opens the box containing the last of her husband’s belongings. What she finds inside rewrites the marriage she thought she knew and reveals a secret that has been waiting decades to reach her. Suddenly, Emerson has to decide whether the life she’s building at Wildflower Ridge can hold the truth about the life she lost.
Set among apple trees, honeybees, vintage trailers, autumn cider pressings, unexpected friendships, and one bear with absolutely no respect for property lines, The Cider House on Wildflower Ridge is a warm, heartfelt later-in-life women’s fiction novel about grief, reinvention, found family, and discovering that a second life doesn’t have to erase the first.
Genre: General Fiction
A forgotten orchard.
A family secret buried for thirty years.
Two years after her husband’s sudden death, fifty-six-year-old Emerson Haven has perfected the art of staying busy enough not to think too hard about what comes next. Then the company she gave twenty-two years to replaces her with a younger woman and sends Emerson home with her career packed into a cardboard box.
With no job, no plan, and no desire to spend the rest of her life proving she’s still useful, Emerson does something wildly out of character. She sells her Manhattan apartment and buys an abandoned apple orchard in upstate New York without ever seeing it in person.
Wildflower Ridge is not the peaceful refuge the photographs promised. The farmhouse is unsafe, the barn is listing to one side, hundreds of apple trees have gone wild, and Emerson’s new home is a mouse-scented vintage Airstream named Dolores. Before long, she’s also acquired Walden, a wary stray dog who seems to have chosen her, Daisy, a young wanderer who can repair almost anything, neighbors who refuse to let her disappear into solitude, and Greg, a quiet beekeeper who understands that grief doesn’t need to be fixed before life can begin again.
As summer turns toward harvest, Emerson slowly begins restoring the orchard and discovers a journal hidden inside the old cider house wall, written by a woman who once loved and lost on the same land. Addie’s words teach Emerson something she never expected to learn, that sometimes survival isn’t about moving on. Sometimes it’s about staying long enough to see what grows.
Then, two years after his death, Emerson finally opens the box containing the last of her husband’s belongings. What she finds inside rewrites the marriage she thought she knew and reveals a secret that has been waiting decades to reach her. Suddenly, Emerson has to decide whether the life she’s building at Wildflower Ridge can hold the truth about the life she lost.
Set among apple trees, honeybees, vintage trailers, autumn cider pressings, unexpected friendships, and one bear with absolutely no respect for property lines, The Cider House on Wildflower Ridge is a warm, heartfelt later-in-life women’s fiction novel about grief, reinvention, found family, and discovering that a second life doesn’t have to erase the first.
Genre: General Fiction
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