Butter Road

A searing novel about a community irrevocably transformed by gun violence.

In 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, taking the students hostage and shooting ten girls before turning his weapon on himself. Set twelve years after this event, largely in the village of Nickel Mines, Butter Road explores the long-reaching ramifications of tragedy through the imagined lives of three women: Emma Walsh, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the shooting; her mother, Ruth, who lost her eldest daughter to the violence; and Sara Caldwell, an “English” outsider and wife of a doctor researching genetic disorders in the Amish population. 

At the novel’s outset, Sara enlists young Emma for housework and gardening to help the Walshes alleviate the debt they’ve accumulated caring for Emma’s disabled brother, who has the rare condition Sara’s husband is studying. Over the course of several months, Sara and Emma form a bond, and as Emma explores Sara’s library, she begins writing fragments of memory on the backs of old feed calendars—a process that leads her to grapple with the devastating deaths of her sister and friends, and the insularity of Amish forgiveness. The more Emma writes, the more she questions her upbringing and ingrained beliefs, ultimately seeing her relationship to Isaac Ames, the man she is destined to marry, in a new light. The story culminates with the characters making breathtaking, self-searching decisions that alter the lives of others as well as their own. 

Emotionally acute and lyrically spare, Butter Road centers on living with what we can’t control, on understanding trauma and collective grief, and on following one’s heart.