The Weight of Ash and Prayer

In a house lined with silence and cedar, generations of women buried what they could not say.

Spanning the cane fields and bayous of South Louisiana—from the Civil War to the present day—The Weight of Ash and Prayer traces a family’s legacy of memory, silence, and quiet resistance.

When Sylvie Rose Broussard agrees to help her young niece with a school genealogy project, she expects a simple task. But what begins in church ledgers and courthouse archives slowly draws her back to the long-quiet house her family once inhabited—and into a story nearly lost to time.

Among faded records and the scent of cedar, Sylvie uncovers fragments of a life both hidden and deliberate: a woman whose choices echo through generations, and a legacy shaped not by dramatic revelations, but by what was withheld, protected, and left unsaid.

This is a contemplative novel—more inward than eventful—about the quiet weight of inheritance: love, grief, land, silence, and the courage it takes to remember.

For readers who appreciate:
Literary fiction with Southern Gothic undertones
Intergenerational storytelling across time periods
Quiet emotional resonance over fast-paced action
Themes of grief, silence, inheritance, and reclamation

If you were moved by The Book of Lost Friends, The Secret Life of Bees, or the emotional intimacy of Marilynne Robinson’s fiction, this novel may stay with you long after the final page.