Ice-Brook Violet

After years of working for a London-based NGO, distributing books and opening schools in impoverished countries, Violea Ender returns, in poor health, to her Oregon roots: a large grain and filbert farm inherited from her widowed mother. She expects to find herself alone there, for the custom farmer and his housekeeper wife are retiring, but gradually finds that her kind mother has left the farm a haven for a few others. These exceptional figures have puzzling connections to the farm, secrets known to her mother but which she must now discover piecemeal. Her startling encounter with another recovering inhabitant bears shocking consequences, which severely tax her highly unstable condition.