Learning to Want Things

About this book

When Zilpha Combs steps off a bus into the sound and glare of New York City, she is twenty-six years old and has never touched a smartphone, ridden a subway, or spoken to a man who is not her kin. Raised inside the Cane Hollow Fellowship, an insular Plain community tucked into the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky, she has just been asked to leave the only life she has ever known. Taken in by a cousin who left years before her, Zilpha is soon drawn into an uneasy arrangement: a magazine profile about people who've walked away from closed religious communities, written by Julian Pryce, a divorced journalist more interested in deadlines than in the people he interviews. As Zilpha learns the strange grammar of a world built on choice and want, and as Julian is forced to reckon with his own stalled, unexamined life, their working relationship becomes something neither of them anticipated. Back in Cane Hollow, a land developer's offer is quietly dividing the community Zilpha left behind, and the truth about why she was really asked to go is more complicated than she was told. A patient, tender, clear-eyed novel about identity, faith, and the difficult work of learning to want a life for yourself, Learning to Want Things follows two people from very different worlds toward a shared, hard-won understanding of what it means to belong.

Book details

Genres:

Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Coming-of-Age Fiction

Language:

en

Published:

2026-07-06

Content rating:

PG