"My parents didn't belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway."

For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country's oldest and most illustrious families--Cabots, Lowells, and Pilgrims: the "first, best people"--by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place, awash with secrets.

Forged from this frigid landscape and descended not from Boston Brahmins but from Italian and Jewish immigrants, Ruthie has been dogged by inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that buries nearly everything in Waitsfield.

As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town's colonial past conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm: from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive.

At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness, where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.