THE WAY YOU BURN

In Meade’s debut novel, a young man struggles to keep his relationship with his girlfriend afloat while uncovering his own family’s secrets. 

When 23-year-old David first meets Hope, he’s immediately taken by her easy charm and beauty, thinking she’s an “effervescent fairy” and a “harbinger of light and good will.” However, he increasingly finds her inscrutable and sees cracks in the persona that she presents, which creates emotional distance between them. She was clearly badly burned in a fire, but he doubts her account of how it happened. One night, during a sexual encounter, he refuses to grant her unsettling request that he strike her in the face. Meade, through David’s perspective, poignantly captures the awkward, unspoken discomfort between them immediately afterward: “I didn’t understand then what you needed to be able to feel. That you needed me to cut through the layers you covered yourself with. I just didn’t know how to do it.” Still, David perseveres, intent on not becoming “just another person on the list of people who have let her down.” He inherits a “rotting cabin” in the woods of New Hampshire from his recently deceased paternal grandfather, Theo, who lived a secluded life as a hermit and always remained something of a mystery. As David continues to recount his faltering relationship with his girlfriend and tries to decipher a series of clues in the cabin that point to well-guarded family secrets, he becomes increasingly aware of a presence in the woods. The entire story is conveyed from David’s first-person perspective, framed as a communication to Hope. Over the course of the novel, Meade artfully explores the cumbersome weight of personal secrets and the emotional consequences of concealing a source of profound shame. It’s revealed, for instance, that David has his own cross to bear—he hit an elderly man with his car and fled the scene of the accident—and Meade vividly depicts the manner in which he tries to free himself of his guilt. 

A moving, emotional, and unpredictable drama.