Synopsis

When Dr. Owen Sheffield—a literature professor with a chip on his shoulder—publishes a provocative book romanticizing the rural white working class, the college where he teaches is thrust into controversy. His ex-wife, Dr. Meredith Sheffield, is left to navigate the fallout alongside her students, including Naya Cruz, an undocumented woman for whom visibility carries significant risk. Meanwhile, at a college in Boston, Dr. Asha Ellis—on track to be her department's first Black woman to earn tenure—unearths the mysterious and forgotten life of a nineteenth-century enslaved person whose erasure echoes the same  blind spots fueling Owen's rise. As these narratives unfold in parallel and then intersect, the novel asks: Who gets to belong, and whose exclusion makes that belonging possible?

Think Dead Poets Society meets The White Lotus at a small Midwestern university.