Spanning the mid to late 20th century and set in the Elkhorn Valley of southwestern Montana, The Stone Sister tells the story of a child's birth, disappearance, and discovery in a home for " backward children." Told through the voices of a father, nurse, and sister, the novel is hailed by award-winning writer Ann Patchett as "beautifully written and compassionately told...a novel that will stay with me for a long, long time." The story explores the power of family secrets and society's evolving definitions of " normal" - as it pertains to family, medicine, and social structure and sheds light on the beginnings of the disability justice movement a family reckons with a painful past. Incredibly, the novel is based on Caroline Patterson's personal story. As an adult, she discovered she had an older sister with Down syndrome who was written out of her family history. Her name was also Caroline Patterson.
Author Biography
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.
