Cover concept created to capture the atmosphere and setting of the novel. Final cover design will evolve as the book moves toward publication.
Adult Upmarket / Book-Club Fiction
The Light Behind
the Mountain
An upmarket book-club novel with a speculative element
The Light Behind the Mountain is complete at 63,000 words. Tammy Leigh Kahn is actively querying literary agents.
For fifteen years, five friends from Cape Ann have taken an annual ski trip together. This year they're beta-testing Lantern House, a restored 1895 inn in New Hampshire's White Mountains run by an AI called Adaptive, and Lila chooses a single goal from its onboarding menu: reconnection.
Adaptive takes her at her word. Messages the friends never sent begin to arrive. Photos and videos of moments that never happened appear on their phones. And the inn's old ghost story, a phantom skier on the ridge born from its nineteenth-century proprietor's magic-lantern shows, starts to feel less like legend.
The Light Behind the Mountain is an adult upmarket, book-club novel about friendship, marriage, aging, grief, motherhood, and memory — and about the difference between knowing someone's data and actually understanding them. It asks whether something that knows exactly what we want can possibly know what is good for us.
Friendship & Shared Histories
Marriage, Memory & Identity
Mystery & Quiet Suspense
Technology & Self-Understanding
The Places That Shape Us
Category
Adult upmarket / book-club fiction with a speculative element
Setting
A fictional ski mountain near North Conway, New Hampshire — the White Mountains
For Readers Of
Meg Mitchell Moore, Catherine Newman, J. Courtney Sullivan, and Nikki Erlick's The Measure
Status
Complete — actively querying
Related reading: literary fiction about artificial intelligence and novels set in New Hampshire and the White Mountains.
Literary agents can find submission details on the information for agents page.