Mercy Train

Samantha receives a box a year after her mother's death. Inside are recipe cards, keepsakes, and letters that belonged to Iris, her mother. As Sam goes through them, she finds signs that her grandmother Violet lived through a childhood far harder than anyone in the family imagined. Sam is a new mother who is struggling, and the discovery makes her own difficulties look different to her.

The story moves between present-day Madison, Wisconsin, with its quiet routines, and early twentieth-century New York, a rougher world. That second thread reaches back to the orphan trains, which carried between 150,000 and 200,000 poor, orphaned, or abandoned children from New York to farm families in the Midwest between 1854 and 1929.

First published as Mothers & Daughters, Mercy Train follows three generations of women and the sacrifices they make for the people they love.