From the “dazzling” author of Woodworking (VOGUE) comes another millennial cult classic: a Little Women–inspired novel that turns expectations on their head and celebrates the power of love to defy definition.

Beth March is the third of four sisters. Well, she was supposed to be the only son in a family of girls, but to everyone’s surprise, she came out as trans in college. Dead to her family, she took the name because, well, Beth March dies, right?

But now she’s home for Christmas for the first time in a decade, hoping the holiday season offers a chance for her and her family to heal the wounds they’ve plastered over. Beth has changed. Her family has changed, not always in welcome ways. But her hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, hasn’t. Including, it seems, Tom Vega, the boy next door who broke her heart back when he couldn’t face his own queerness.

Tom is barely scraping by. Working a job he hates as a handyman in a business he inherited from his father, he’s also stuck in his childhood home and struggling to connect with his young daughter ever since his wife passed away. So, Beth’s arrival in Duluth is an unwelcome complication. Or so he tells himself.

Because when Beth and Tom bump into each other again, sparks fly. Immediately.

And as they circle each other, getting ever closer and ever more scared, both must ask themselves what they’d be giving up by disappearing into heterosexuality—and whether they’d be betraying their communities in doing so.

With charm and wit and the spirit of Louisa May Alcott threaded through its pages, Beth March Returns from the Dead is a brilliantly fresh romance from a writer ever more “deserving of [her] place in the transfeminine literary canon” (PEN America).