The Seed Library of Willow Creek
A Novel of Heirloom Seeds and Second Chances

About this book:

Clara Vance left Willow Creek for sterile labs and peer-reviewed journals, trading red clay for climate-controlled greenhouses. Ten years later, a dead grant and a library basement summon her home to run a seed library—where patrons borrow heirloom varieties and return the harvest's saved seeds. But the dusty mason jars hold more than genetics: her grandmother's lost Bloodline beans, her father's Cherokee Purple tomatoes saved the year her mother died, and the quiet, devastating proof that the man she left behind never stopped tending the ground she fled.

Silas Hayes never left. He knows which hollows hold the best greasy beans, how to coax life from forty-year-old seed with chamomile tea, and exactly why Clara's father let the tomato stakes rot. As they catalog the valley's vanishing varieties—Moonshiner's Squash, Half-Runner Pole, kernels carried over the mountains before roads existed—old wounds and older secrets germinate. The seeds demand patience, fermentation, the messy work of breaking dormancy. So does coming home.

In a novel rooted deep in Appalachian soil, every saved seed carries a story, and every story carries a chance to grow something true. *The Seed Library of Willow Creek* is a lyrical, layered debut about the varieties we preserve, the lineages we inherit, and the second chances that only bloom when we stop running—and start planting.