Sorrowland

Sorrowland is a novel by the American writer Rivers Solomon, published in 2021. It is described as a gothic science fiction novel, and it places a story about a woman's body beside a story about the community that shaped her.

Vern Riley, who is intersex, is raised in a settlement called Cainland, a separatist community led by a man she is required to marry as a girl. The members of the community are troubled by what they call hauntings, and Vern does not accept the explanation she is given for them; she leaves to bring up her children away from the settlement and away from its leader.

Life in the woods is solitary and hard, and Vern's body begins to do things that ordinary medicine does not account for. She is also not alone: she is followed, and the people she meets while looking for a friend who escaped Cainland as she did turn out to know more about where she came from than she does. The novel moves between the escape, the search for an explanation, and the history of a community built on an idea that has consequences for the people born into it.