Independent booksellers across the country have chosen Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear (Knopf) as their top pick for the April 2026 Indie Next List.
“Yesteryear is a thoughtful look behind the curtain at carefully curated social media influencers. Like Natalie’s staff, I didn’t care for her ‘perfect life’ but I couldn’t quit reading this story. Hard to believe this is a debut,” said Angela Sides of Monkey and Dog Books in Fort Worth, Texas.
Here, Burke discusses her work with Bookselling This Week.
Bookselling This Week: I heard that you were fascinated by the tradwife lifestyle, as a lot of us are, but I'm curious how your opinions on this lifestyle changed or evolved over the course of writing this.
Caro Claire Burke: That's a great question.
I do think that writing Yesteryear gave me increased empathy for the plight of the modern-day worker.
You really can't win. I think that's why the discourse has always fascinated me, it serves as a reminder that there is no way out.
And that's a theme in the book.
The tradwife lifestyle that is completely a fantasy. It's not real.
You may choose to stay at home and take care of your kids, and you may even choose to engage in a heteronormative, subservient relationship with your husband, but you still are not going to have the life that you see on these accounts.
It's a complete fantasy. But so is the fantasy of being a working woman who has everything under control. So is the fantasy of having a job, and having children and having a husband, and having it all feel effortless like the 2000s girl boss era would have us feel.
That was something that increasingly interested me as I wrote the book, this idea that there really is no escaping.
And when you have that feeling, there's a very different type of urgency to the current economic situation. There is no decision that will actually alleviate the pressure that these gendered roles put on us in our current economy.
BTW: One of the things that I wanted to ask about is creating Natalie's character. She's not a likable character, right? But at the same time, we are invested, we are rooting for her.
It can be so challenging to create a character that's unlikable but still sympathetic, so I'd love to hear more about how you built her.
CCB: If I had taken much time to consider how other people would view her, I probably would have become very paralyzed by it.
I've been writing for a long time. I got my MFA. I'm very aware of the trope of the unlikable woman and how I think we like to pretend that we like them.
We think it's a trope, but really, nine times out of 10, it becomes like a disqualifying factor for a woman in a book.
I think that Yesteryear ended up being such an unselfconscious project, because I didn't give myself time to think about what other people would think of it.
I really just wrote my way into Natalie's voice, and as soon as I had it, I was like, “Well, this interests me. I'm going to finish it for that reason alone.”
Once we were in the editing phase I took more time to be like, “I'm very aware of how she's going to be perceived, but can we make sure that there is balance?”
Do we have moments where you see her humanity or a moment of softness or vulnerability? Because those moments go a very long way.
But with a character like Natalie, you just have to let it go and be like, “Yeah, she's abysmal.” She's bigoted, she's cruel, she's negligent.
I never wanted for there to be a moment on the page where it was like, “and, of course, this is wrong.” I don't have to explain that that's bigoted. I can trust that the reader is smart.
That was a decision that I made very consciously — to not go back and soften it or make it clear that what she’s doing is not okay, to make her exist and then let people deal with it in their own, in their own privacy of their own home.
BTW: That's an excellent answer. And weirdly, I think that’s something we’re losing in more visual media, the trust that your audience can page attention and understand what’s happening.
I think it's really important. Natalie's character is racist and sexist. And I don't know if she does this directly, but I'm sure she would be transphobic. She's phobic of everything.
You have to decide if you can bear it. You have to decide if she's redeemable, you have to decide what is inappropriate. I really wanted to give people that freedom, and it was also just more fun for me to write it that way.
BTW: Which is really the best motivation.
The timeline here was a little weird because it was picked up for an adaptation before it was even completed, right?
CCB: Yeah. I wrote the first draft in the winter of 2024. We sold the book, and then we sold film rights immediately after.
It was just like a weird circumstance. I think the book got picked up by scouts in the book industry and then they brought it over to the film industry, so it kind of happened organically.
I wrote the first draft very quickly. I don't know what I was writing, so I felt like I had to get to the end so that I could get back to the beginning. I think that may have helped, because it was such a skeletal draft.
It was very plotty. It was just dialogue. It was probably as close to a script as a book can be, because I hadn’t added all the exposition yet.
But I’m really not sure, it was just crazy circumstances, honestly.
BTW: How has that experience been for you? How do you feel?
CCB: I feel like I stopped feeling things acutely when I sold the book.
I feel so lucky. I mean, I've wanted to be a writer for so long. I've been studying the industry for a really long time, so I'm very aware that this is just like extraordinarily lucky.
I'm trying to really be present to it. But I will say, I feel like my emotions turned off the day we sold Yesteryear and I'm waiting for them to come back.
BTW: Would you like to say a little bit about the role of books or indie bookstores in your own?
CCB: I've always been aware of how intimate independent bookstores are. When you go into an indie bookstore, more than any other type of bookstore, the booksellers are going to know what to recommend.
That's always been something that I experienced as a reader, but it's been so jaw-dropping for me as a writer to get a peek behind the curtain and see, not just how much influence independent booksellers have (which was a pleasant surprise for me), but also how passionate they are.
I imagined that like Yesteryear would come out in April, and maybe some booksellers would read it, but also they might just stock it. But I feel like I've had more interaction with indie booksellers than I have from early readers! It's so much fun to hear from people at stores and to write them down in my notes to visit later.
Every interaction I have with them is marked by so much passion and curiosity and excitement for what they do. It's truly an honor to be able to be supported by them, and it makes me really appreciate all of the work that goes into running a bookstore. I really didn't even begin to understand and comprehend the passion they put into reading and selecting and stocking. It's a marvel, honestly.