Vera Paperback – March 30, 2026

Chara Stanley is a talented photographer who has spent twelve years choosing safety over every dream that called to her, the prestigious fellowship, the man who loved her, the creative life she abandoned in favor of managing the family farm’s books. When an off-trail climb in a Colorado canyon ends in a devastating fall, she finds herself stranded on a narrow ledge with a shattered leg, cracked ribs, no phone, and no one who knows where she is.Her only companion is a hosta plant—a garden species with no business surviving on bare canyon stone—that has been growing alone on that ledge for years. As Chara’s body weakens and fever sets in, a bond forms between woman and plant that defies everything she thought she knew about consciousness, connection, and faith. Through Vera, Chara begins to hear the voice she has spent a lifetime ignoring: her own.Told in dual perspective, Chara’s urgent, embodied voice and Vera’s patient, rooted wisdom, this novel traces five days of survival that become a reckoning with a lifetime of retreat. Against the vast indifference of the canyon, Chara confronts the fear that taught her to make herself small, the mother whose faith she set aside, and the love she was too afraid to claim. And Vera discovers that the years of solitary growth on an impossible ledge were preparation for a purpose she never imagined.Vera is a novel about what it means to be truly seen. About the courage it takes to reach for something when you can’t see what you’re reaching toward. About discovering that purpose doesn’t require an audience, that patience is not passive but fierce, and that the seeds we abandoned were never wasted, they were waiting for the season they were meant to bloom.With prose that moves between lyrical meditation and raw emotional honesty, Vera explores themes of grief, creative courage, Black womanhood, and the quiet, stubborn persistence of growing things. It is a story about roots and reaching, about falling and being held, and about the Gardener who plants where He will, even in impossible soil. Read more