Difficult Patrons

A darkly funny novel about chronic pain, obligation, and survival, tracing a young librarian’s descent through the intersecting failures of healthcare, family, and public institutions, from the author of These Ghosts Are Family. During her first few months on the job, Valerie Channer has learned that librarians do far more than shelve books. They are also social workers, crisis counselors, and reluctant witnesses to the quiet catastrophes unfolding daily among the library’s most difficult patrons. But while she navigates unruly regulars, unhoused visitors, and impossible workplace politics, Valerie is hiding a devastating secret of her own: massive uterine fibroids and endometriosis that threatens her health, her future, and her ability to work. As Valerie searches for treatment she knows she ultimately will not be able to afford, she is pulled deeper into the complicated lives of library patrons and her fractured Jamaican family she can never quite escape. When a long-lost aunt unexpectedly reappears, forcing Valerie to confront old betrayals and buried obligations, the line between caregiver and the one in need of saving begins to waver. By turns heartbreaking, darkly funny, and deeply compassionate, Difficult Patrons is a powerful novel about invisible labor, the people society overlooks, and the impossible choices we make to preserve our dignity, our bodies, and the families that both sustain and wound us.