The ascent A novel

Allison Buccola

Book - 2025

"Twenty years ago, the members of a reclusive commune outside Philadelphia vanished without a trace. The mystery of their disappearance has never been solved. No sightings of the members were ever verified, and no bodies ever found. But the group did leave one thing behind: a twelve-year-old girl wandering alone on the side of the road in search of her lost family. In the years since that morning, Lee Burton has tried to put the pain of her past behind her. She has built a new identity for herself, with a doting husband and seven-month-old daughter. No one in her life now knows about her connection to "the cult that went missing," not even her husband. But new motherhood is proving a bigger challenge than she anticipated. She... doesn't want to let her daughter, Lucy, out of her sight even for a moment. She can't return to work. She is not sleeping, and starting to have paranoid thoughts of Lucy being harmed. Then a stranger show up on her doorstep, who claims to be her long-lost sister. In her Lee sees the path to understanding the truth about her past, finally--if she could only trust that the woman is who she says she is. As she digs deeper into the truth about the woman's history the safe, stable life that Lee has constructed for herself threatens to shatter"-- more