Mad Honey

When Beck Wise vanished, his girlfriend Melissa Makepeace poured herself into caring for the family farm, silently absorbing yet another man disappearing from her life. But when Beck reappears three months later, thin, pale, with no idea what day it is and filled with memories of being bees, a series of layered mysteries begins to unravel. What had happened to Beck? Where did her father go? How can she keep the farm together? With gorgeous descriptions, deft characterizations and a page-turning plot, Mad Honey immerses the reader in a search for truth bounded by the everyday magic of beekeeping, of family and of finding peace, all while asking how much we really understand the natural world.

“It had me buzzing and gliding along the golden threads of honeyed magic, simply delighting in the rich and juicy descriptions and then it whipped into a fabulous mystery!”

— Lisa de Nikolits, Minerva Reader

“Welch does for beekeeping what W.P. Kinsella did for baseball or Ernest Hemingway did for fishing. Through her deftly-controlled description, we see bee colonies, and the humans that tend to them, from a perspective that is engaging and eye-opening. We are invited to peel back the layers of Welch’s characters and their almost idyllic, agrarian lives to see the pain and angst beneath.”

– The Quarantine Review

 

“There is a buzzing hum to Mad Honey, the drone of secrets linking characters together in ways that are both sticky and sweet. From rustic cabins in the Canadian wilderness to Cuban gardens bursting in bloom, from country fairs to dive bars, the reader is taken on a wild ride. Part Canadian farmhouse gothic, part family mystery, Welch’s is a propulsive debut.”
— Laisha Rosnau

“Katie Welch reminds us that we are a very small part of a massive and complex non-human world and that, where we heed the lessons of non-centrality, we can also truly love. Mad Honey is a beautiful novel.”

— Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Perfecting and All the Broken Things