Stacey Gordon grew up in the Appalachian foothills of southern Ohio and began her career as a trade journalist covering the cultured pearl and jewelry industries, visiting farms across Asia and companies around the world. For the past twenty-five years she’s worked in marketing and user experience design for the Silicon Valley tech industry. This is her debut novel. She lives with her family in Alameda, California.

For fans of Ann Patchett, a layered, multigenerational family novel about three sisters carrying on the legacy of their family’s pearl farm in small-town Tennessee.

Three estranged sisters—Helen, Anna, and Penn Lockshire—are bound by the shimmering but fragile legacy of their family’s freshwater pearl farm in rural Tennessee. When the business that once made them famous faces collapse, the sisters are pulled back into each other’s lives and forced to reckon with old betrayals, unspoken resentments, and the complicated truth of their inheritance. Soon, what began as a fight for survival becomes a reckoning with the myths that shaped them and the secrets buried in the family’s past.

From the discovery of a rare pearl in 1981 to the struggles of a failing farm in 2008, the Lockshire sisters must navigate love, loss, ambition, and forgiveness to decide whether their heritage is a blessing to preserve—or a burden to escape.

Rich with emotional depth and anchored by the pearl’s enduring symbolism—a thing of beauty born from irritation—this sweeping story of family, identity, and resilience will captivate readers of Celeste Ng and Claire Lombardo.