The Hudson Valley’s literary landscape isn’t cooling off just because the temperatures are. Five new books on the market trace journeys of appetite, identity, memory, and home. From Tamar Adler’s meditative kitchen wisdom to Joseph Luzzi’s Renaissance deep dive and Diane Botnick’s multigenerational novel of survival, these works reveal the many ways stories shape—and reshape—our sense of place.
Feast on Your Life
Tamar Adler
Simon & Schuster, 2025, $29
In Feast on Your Life, Adler offers a year of gentle kitchen meditations—small rituals, sudden delights, and the quiet alchemy of ordinary meals. Structured as short lyrical entries, the book turns everyday cooking and eating into an intentional practice of noticing and gratitude. Though she now lives in Spain, Adler wrote the book while she was living in Hudson. She draws on her deep-rooted sense of place and culinary history to show how the act of feeding becomes a gateway to living more thoughtfully. Whether you’re stirring soup or breaking bread, this is a reminder that every meal holds the possibility of quiet ceremony.
Cat
Rebecca van Laer
Bloomsbury, 2025, $14.95
In Cat, Kingston-based writer Van Laer uses her own feline-filled household as a springboard into deeper questions of companionship, loss, and belonging. With two senior cats at her side, she traces her move to the Hudson Valley and explores how these quietly inscrutable animals mirror the rhythms of home, partnership, and longing. Interweaving memoir with cultural history and ecological reflection, the book considers what a cat teaches us about independence, care, and the nature of being “domestic.” For anyone who’s ever watched a cat nap in sunlight and felt something stir—a reading experience both gentle and sharp.
The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood
Joseph Luzzi
W. W. Norton & Company, 2025, $29.99
In The Innocents of Florence, Bard professor Luzzi uncovers how a pioneering orphanage in 15th-century Florence not only rescued thousands of abandoned children but also reshaped the very idea of childhood. Starting in 1445, Ospedale degli Innocenti defied prevailing norms by embracing education, care, and dignity for society’s youngest. Its famed Renaissance architecture, philanthropic founders, and arts-rich environment belie a complex story of hope, neglect, and social change. Luzzi’s insightful narrative connects these early efforts to modern conceptions of children’s rights and upbringing—and offers a gripping portrait of how Renaissance Italy helped birth a new way of being young.
Becoming Sarah
Diane Botnick
Simon & Shuster, 2025, $17.99
In Becoming Sarah, Cold Spring resident Diane Botnick traces a haunting multigenerational saga, beginning with Sarah Vogel—born in Auschwitz, yet carrying little memory of the place. As Sarah reinvents herself from war-waste in Europe to America’s promise of self-creation, she passes a legacy of silence, survival, and longing to daughters and granddaughters. Botnick sketches four women bound by trauma, reinvention, and the quiet will to endure—as each woman strains under the weight of what was left unsaid and what must now be spoken. A lyrical, sharp exploration of identity and inheritance.
Taking Leave
Deborah Kapchan
Duke University Press, 2025, $19.95
In Taking Leave, Beacon-area resident Kapchan traces a spiritual and geographic journey from New York and Paris to Casablanca, Jerusalem, and Abu Dhabi. With a Christian childhood, Jewish roots and a later embrace of Islam, she invites us into the liminal spaces where faith, identity, and belonging overlap and unravel. As she examines the shape of “taking leave”—of homeland, of tradition, of the selves we inherit—she offers a plea for coexistence beyond borders of dogma and culture. Lyrical, probing, and unflinching, the book is a meditation on presence, absence, and what it means to live between.
This article appears in December 2025.
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