Caroline Patterson is the author of The Stone Sister, winner of the 2021 Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press and the 2022 High Plains Book Festival prize for women's fiction. She published the collection Ballet at the Moose Lodge, the anthology Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart, which won a gold Willa Prize and two children's books on the natural world. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and received awards from the Montana Arts Council, the San Francisco Foundation, and Henfield Foundation. She retired in 2023 as executive director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative.

In The Stone Sister, Caroline Patterson tells the moving story of how the decisions we make shape our lives and define our future. Beautifully written and compassionately told, this is a novel that will stay with me for a long, long time. --Ann Patchett

The Stone Sister is a remarkable story of empathy, sorrow, and tender reflection. It is Caroline Patterson's own story transfigured through fiction into a larger truth. A Downs syndrome baby girl is born to a middle class couple in a small Montana city, hidden away in a mental institution, and deliberately forgotten until her adult sister learns of her existence and begins a painful and meticulous search. Told in the voices of a self-justifying father, a devoted nurse, and a questing sister, the lost child's journey reveals the anguish, fears, and horrors that society inflicts on those who do not fit into its definitions of normal. This is a fable for our time-a story to inform and instruct as traditional ideas of identity and inclusion are being challenged in all corners of our smug old world. --Annick Smith

In this poignant and necessary novel, Patterson draws from her own family history to gently expose the secret shame of families who hid their developmentally challenged children in the 50s and 60s, a shame that lingered and touched the lives of everyone involved. --Alka Joshi

Daring and vastly compassionate, Caroline Patterson insists there is always more to the story, as The Stone Sister's fearless characters confront the hidden truths of where they live and who they are. --Susanna Sonnenberg

Above all, because Caroline Patterson's The Stone Sister is a retelling of the author's own painful family history, it represents an extraordinary act of courage. This is a book with a big heart, the characters human, alive and compelling, the heartbreaking subject at its core consequential as blood. --Kim Zupan

The Stone Sister is a powerful meditation on family, caregiving, and secrets. Caroline Patterson paints a nuanced portrait of an era, its policies forged with good intentions and devastating consequences. Encompassing many parallels to today, the novel underlines the tragedy of turning away from those who make us uncomfortable. --Janet Skeslien Charles

Heart-breaking, riveting, and urgent, The Stone Sister explores forces more powerful than love: shame, secrets, expectations. Patterson writes like a dream. Flesh-and-blood characters and stunning prose make her debut an instant classic. --Diana Spechler

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press

Pub date: 2021-09-01

Length: 454 pages