Fall, in its first weeks, scatters its footprints through the Shenandoah Valley---mist and color, shadow and cold---sparsely at first, and then with greater fury. As Our Burden’s Light opens, two families are caught on either side of a moment of small-town violence; subsequently fighting desperately to find their separate ways out of its grasp. One family combusts under the weight of loss, while the other is quietly buried by it. Debut novelist Patrick Thomas Casey reimagines the Edenic story of being cast out of paradise, using the lens of contemporary America and the poignant stories of three people knotted together. Our Burden’s Light traces the arcs of innocence and its loss, memory and love, home and its inevitable vanishing, which turn through Casey’s beautifully-rendered characters’ fracturing lives, in a chorus of voices moving ever farther away from the valley they once shared. This is a powerful entrée by a talented new voice in literary fiction. Read Less