The Orchard at the Edge of the Map

About this novel

Oris Tarrow has spent years keeping Lastfold Orchard alive, and keeping its impossible fruit out of official hands. The fruit offers brief glimpses of possible futures. Now one graft shows the same disaster again and again: a nearby town, an industrial project, and an evacuation no one can afford to treat as fate.

When Hesta Ruun, a cartographer from the capital, arrives to map the phenomenon, she brings a disciplined eye, a confidential brief, and reasons of her own to keep the orchard's location hidden. Oris distrusts what maps can authorize. Hesta distrusts what longing can mistake for evidence. As sabotage gives way to a more unsettling truth, their investigation reveals that every attempt to stop the disaster may be building the future it fears.

To save the town, they will have to give up certainty, expose the costs of their own expertise, and choose what remains when the orchard can no longer answer for them.

A way into the story

A literary fantasy mystery with a slow-burn romance, rooted in work, weather, and the courage to choose without certainty. Begin with the tension between Oris's knowledge of a living orchard and Hesta's need to test what she is told. The story brings possible futures, institutional authority, and intimacy into the same investigation.