Yesteryear

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

This razor-sharp debut satire introduces Natalie Heller Mills, a 32-year-old influencer who has built her fame chronicling life as a "tradwife" — a woman devoted to a conservative, back-to-basics lifestyle styled after earlier eras. Then one morning, her curated world tilts sideways: her polished home has become a bare, unheated cabin with no running water, and the children inside it look like her own kids yet feel like total strangers. Suddenly, the homesteading fantasy she has spent years performing for an audience becomes something she must actually live.

Told across dual timelines, the novel traces the disorienting present alongside the story of how Natalie got here — building a multimillion-dollar brand on a fictionalized, sanitized vision of frontier life, all while her real household quietly frays behind the scenes. As the boundaries between performance and reality blur further, the story becomes a dark, often mordantly funny reckoning with the costs of that carefully constructed image, for Natalie and for those around her.

Praised by author Louise O'Neill as belonging to the tradition of The Stepford Wives and The Handmaid's Tale, Yesteryear has been called enraging, thrilling, and grimly funny in the way of good satire, while remaining intensely humane. A Good Morning America Book Club pick, this bold and biting debut offers an unflinching look at motherhood, faith, and the seductive, dangerous power of a perfectly filtered life.