The Burning Mountain

She came to Sicily to scatter her husband's ashes. She didn't expect to find her way back to life.

Margot is seventy-two, newly widowed, and carrying Marco in a brass container against her heart. After eighteen months of grief, she's finally ready to let him go - somewhere beautiful, somewhere he would have loved, somewhere that might teach her how to live without him.

A yoga retreat in Sicily seems like the answer.

She didn't count on the jackhammers at the first villa. Or the nun with a flask of Irish whiskey. Or the influencer having a breakdown about whether she's documenting her life or actually living it. Or the married couple who signed up to save their marriage and can barely look at each other. Or the therapist who holds space for everyone except herself.

And she definitely didn't expect the penis bar.

As the group climbs volcanoes, makes pizza, confronts old wounds, and accidentally becomes a family, Margot begins to understand: grief isn't something you get over. It's something you learn to carry differently. And sometimes the people who help you do that are strangers you met a week ago on an island made of fire.

Funny, heartbreaking, and full of pasta, The Burning Mountain is a novel about loss and laughter, transformation and terrible jokes, and what happens when twelve broken people let Sicily crack them all the way open.

For readers who loved Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and anyone who's ever ugly-cried at a sunset.