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 combining domestic suspense with a lightly speculative mystery
The Light Behind the Mountain is currently in revision. Tammy Leigh Kahn is seeking literary representation.
When a group of longtime friends gathers for a winter weekend at Lantern House — a restored nineteenth-century inn in North Conway, New Hampshire, run by an artificial intelligence called Adaptive — they expect fresh snow, familiar company, and a chance to reconnect. What they find is a house that has been quietly learning them, and a question none of them wants to answer out loud.
Over four days in the White Mountains, old friendships are tested, marriages strain under things left unsaid, and carefully told versions of the past begin to come apart. Adaptive knows each guest's preferences, patterns, and history — the temperature they sleep best at, the songs they return to, the names they no longer say. What it offers them feels like care. What it sets in motion becomes a mystery no one in the house can explain away.
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 suspense and a lightly speculative element
Setting
North Conway, New Hampshire — the White Mountains
For Readers Of
Meg Mitchell Moore, Jaime Day, Catherine Newman, J. Courtney Sullivan
Status
In revision (Draft 2)
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.