The Lost Mother — Mary McGarry Morris

Abandoned by his wife, a man tries to protect his family during the Great Depression, in this “powerful” novel by the bestselling author of Songs in Ordinary Time (Publishers Weekly).
 
During the Great Depression, rural Vermont suffers along with the rest of the country, and Henry Talcott, with only occasional work as a butcher, is reduced to moving into a tent on the edge of Black Pond with his two children. Their beautiful but unreliable mother has left them, and Henry is devastated by her desertion. He hasn't told Thomas or Margaret why she left -- or if she will return.
 
Told from twelve-year-old Thomas's perspective, The Lost Mother follows this shattered family as a wealthy neighbor begins to woo the children as companions for her strange, housebound son, and Henry weighs an unexpected proposition, the consequences of which may cost him everything. “A perfectly lovely story about perfectly awful things” by the New York Times�"bestselling and National Book Award�"nominated author of A Dangerous Woman and Light from a Distant Star, The Lost Mother is “the quietest, subtlest novel that has ever kept [its readers] up into the small hours of the night, unable to look away” (The Washington Post).