To Stay, To Stay, To Stay

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2026 First Novel Prize!

An ensemble cast collides and crosses paths in their small corner of the Midwest where no one is a stranger: the baker, the realtor, the poet, the gardener, the frustrated artist. In Devon Halliday’s transcendent debut novel, secrets turn contagious, impulses transform into resolutions, and no one is certain whether they will remain in the confines of their Appalachian college town or step out into the unknown.

Surrounded by hills, buried in green, Eden is a forgotten town full of ordinary lives. But over the course of a humid summer week, seven of these ordinary lives reach their boiling point, as the existential questions of each begin to urgently entwine. Underneath the threat of marital infidelity, financial ruin, and life-changing illness is always the same question: To stay, or to go? If you choose to stay, is it ever a permanent choice? Can you be sure you’ll choose it again tomorrow? A mosaic portrait of love and its close substitutes, the novel suggests, fearfully, that even our best decisions might be fragile, arbitrary, and impermanent.