When Joby Hawkins fled Saratoga Springs at eighteen, he left everything behind—the Victorian house he grew up in, the mother he blamed for his father’s death, and the childhood he’d spent trying to forget. Twenty-five years later, on the other side of the country, he has rebuilt something like a life: a tenured position teaching English literature, a wooden sailboat named Sonnet, and weekends with his genderfluid teenager, River.

Then his sister calls. Esty is moving to Spain—and someone has to take care of their mother.

What begins as a reluctant cross-country rescue becomes something far more complicated—a road trip through grief, memory, and the stubborn arithmetic of family. Joby will have to reckon with a mother whose Alzheimer’s has softened the monster he made of her. With a child who is becoming someone new, and who sees their father more clearly than he sees himself. And with the marriage he let slip away and the question of whether anything between them is still salvageable.

Moving between the fog-draped shores of Moss Bay and the historic streets of Saratoga Springs, between a luminous past and a messy, unresolved present, Earthshine is a novel about what we inherit, what we refuse, and what we finally, slowly learn to hold. It asks what it costs to build a life around the avoidance of pain—and what it might look like to choose differently.

Tender, funny, and deeply felt, Christopher Kostyn Passante’s debut is a story about imperfect lives, imperfect love, and the light we reflect back onto one another without even knowing it.