Her Kind: A Novel

“Sophie Lefens's voice is blazingly original. Her Kind is a poignant and revelatory meditation on motherhood, womanhood, and the friendships that sustain both. This novel will nourish, inspire, and console you—you'll want to stay in it as long as you can.”
—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls and Whidbey

An exquisite, mist-laced debut novel about friendship and motherhood, fear and love, in which a woman plagued by visions of being pulled away from Earth invites her three closest friends for a weekend, to see who might care for her son if she dies

When Ada is left to raise her young son alone, she retreats to her otherworldly aunt Leigh’s crumbling lakeside home, seeking solace for herself and stability for Lenny. Yet, among the wildflowers and the hum of the water, Ada can’t escape the nagging feeling she might not have much time left. Sensing death grow nearer, she invites her three closest friends—a brash, unemployed seamstress; a gentle, disillusioned violinist; and a serious painter—to the house over a long weekend to determine which of them might take on the impossible: raising Lenny if she no longer can.

Amidst strange animal activity and Leigh’s mysterious late-night visits to her dead husband’s grave, the women find comfort and purpose in one another’s company as their stay extends into winter. Meanwhile, Leigh’s memory is fading fast, and Ada must confront past and present truths she’s spent a lifetime avoiding.

When death does finally come to the group, it sets off a chain of events that exposes long-hidden secrets and the true mystical nature of Leigh and her ancestral home. Written in attentive, insightful prose, Her Kind is an ode to the power of love to return us to ourselves.

“Sophie Lefens has given me exactly what I hope for in a novel: Her Kind is both poetic and propulsive, beautifully written and un-put-down-able. What moved me most about this book is its generous, expansive idea of family—who we build our lives around, who we can count on, who shows up, who stays.” - Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful and A Suit or a Suitcase

“Sophie Lefens's voice is blazingly original, her debut, an irresistible premise at the outset that will keep you rapt and enamored of its characters—each brimming with heart and mystery. The seasons of Her Kind are all-consuming; you'll live inside the weather of this novel, the steady and cornucopian turn of nature. Sacred, too, is the mystical and the animal, the gentle wisdom of their dimensions. Her Kind is a poignant and revelatory meditation on motherhood, womanhood, and the friendships that sustain both. This novel will nourish, inspire, and console you—you'll want to stay in it as long as you can.” - T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls and Whidbey