In the winter of 2024, I emailed my literary agent under the subject Caro update/seeking your thoughts. I had an idea for a new novel. ‘The elevator pitch is this,’ I wrote. ‘A modern and highly famous tradwife wakes up one morning to find herself stuck in the actual homesteading days.’
By that point, I’d spent several weeks consuming and participating in the tradwife discourse online. Perhaps as a result, I’d woken up that morning with an entire storyline in my mind. I could see it clearly: a house, a barn, a woman. A formal three-part structure. Two families, two sets of children. Two narrative threads, a past and a present, braiding tightly into knots as the story races to answer a single cliff-drop of a question: how did this woman end up living in the past?
‘The novel will be dystopic and funny and have a true-crime bent to it,’ I went on. ‘The tentative name for the manuscript is Yesteryear.’
She replied immediately. ‘I fully encourage you to go full throttle here – and quickly!’
The next morning, I opened a google doc and typed two letters into the header: YY. I wrote a draft in nine weeks flat.
‘Yesteryear is, to me, a novel about the maddening contradictions of modern womanhood’
Much of the final version of my debut novel is, in ways that still stun me, exactly as I imagined it on the cold winter morning I first emailed my agent with the idea. There’s the house and the barn and the woman. The two worlds, the two families. The formal three-part structure, and the two interweaving narratives. The novel is, as I imagined, dystopic and funny with a true crime bent to it. The final title is, of course, Yesteryear. Only one aspect is entirely different on the page than I imagined it originally, and it is perhaps the most important element of all: the identity of the main character, Natalie Heller Mills.
Natalie is nothing like I imagined her to be. In fact she’s nothing like any other character I’ve ever written before, or of any others that I’ve read. Sometimes it feels like I didn’t make her so much as find her. She’s real to me. Terrifyingly so.
As I approach publication day, I can’t help but feel like I’m releasing a person out into the world, rather than a book. I’m thrilled for you to meet her, but I must warn you: I have no idea what she plans to do next.
— Caro Claire Burke
About the book
07 April 2026
‘The Stepford Wives meets The Handmaid’s Tale’
‘My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.’
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle – and has the social media accounts to prove it. Her charming farmhouse on her working ranch is artfully cluttered, her husband is a handsome cowboy, her homemade sourdough boules are each more beautiful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers and industrial-grade ovens behind the scenes? What Natalie’s followers don’t know won’t hurt them.
Then, one morning, Natalie wakes up in a strange, horrible version of reality. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Is this a hoax? A reality show? A test from God? One thing Natalie does know is that it’ll make one hell of an Instagram post…