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The Last Sweet Taste

by Craig Nova

A search for solid ground in Vermont

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Awards & Recognition

  • Critical praise

    Booklist starred review

    Starred review; the review praises the novel as “galvanizing.”

AlbakiReads Editorial

A search for solid ground in Vermont

After a serious health diagnosis, Anna Burke leaves the city in search of truth and comfort, arriving in a Vermont town facing a dangerous ice dam. The crisis brings her into the orbit of Noah and Cyrus Wolfe, a father-and-son team of dynamiters whose attempt to clear it goes wrong. Anna’s personal search and the town’s urgent predicament meet in a story about resilience, vulnerability, and the possibility of finding sweetness in ordinary lives. The novel pairs an intimate reckoning with health and uncertainty with a community-scale danger rooted in the Vermont landscape.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in literary fiction about illness, uncertainty, and resilience.
  • Those drawn to stories set in small-town Vermont and shaped by a community crisis.
  • Readers looking for a novel that explores unexpected connection and everyday sources of comfort.

Themes

Resilience amid illness and uncertaintyTruth and comfortCommunity and connectionVulnerabilitySmall triumphs

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

"I seem tough, but I'm 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 isn't 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 life's precariousness and love as sweetness and agony, this is a galvanizing novel of hardscrabble tenderness."--Booklist (starred review)
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